Novel Design of Photonic Digital Sensors for Distinguishing Uniformly-Distributed Refractive Indices of Fluids

Abstract The authors propose a novel structure of k-level (k is an arbitrary integer) photonic digital sensor based on directional couplers with specific structural parameters. Its function is similar to an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in electronic system, and capable of distinguishing 2k+1-1 discrete and uniformly-distributed refractive indices of the fluidic samples. In this paper, the principle of designing the photonic digital sensor is described, and the beam propagation method (BPM) simulation results are presented for demonstrating the validity of our design.摘要 本文作者提出了一种基于特定结构参数定向耦合器的新型k级（k为任意整数）光子数字传感器结构。该传感器的功能与电子系统中的模数转换器（ADC）类似，可区分2^(k+1)-1个离散且均匀分布的流体样品折射率。本文阐述了该光子数字传感器的设计原理，并给出了束传播法（BPM）的仿真结果，以验证所提设计的有效性。