Photonic integrated circuits for advanced sensing

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The development of new sensor technologies are crucial for Canada from the environmental and socioeconomic points of view. The North faces the great challenge of climate change, while under-standing and monitoring its impact is severely limited by energy constraints. Canada has 500,000active oil wells and 1,000,000 kilometres of pipelines for gathering and distributing oil and gas. The high sensitivity and immunity to electromagnetic interference make optical sensors ideally suited to energy transportation and distributed manufacturing for hazard control, quality assessment, and low-carbon-emission processing. Scientific advances probing spectral and polarization properties of photons led to cutting-edge optical sensing techniques. However, their application has been confounded by the lack of techniques amenable for economical mass-production. This research aims to solve this issue. This research program is proposed to advance silicon photopic integrated circuits for high-performance, chip-scale optical sensors. Silicon photonics is a disruptive technology that promises to cram more complexity on a single chip while drastically reducing energy consumption, footprint and cost of optical communications and sensor systems. In addition, silicon photonic chips can be readily integrated with advanced electronics using established semiconductor processes, making the technology immensely appealing in a vast number of applications. The outcomes of our research will enable unprecedented coverage of the multi-dimensional characteristics of light (e.g., polarization, phase, frequency, and intensity) on a tiny chip, which will be instrumental to possible breakthroughs in the fields of environmental monitoring, biomedical diagnosis, and remote sensing. The impact to Canadians will be seen through transformative applications of ultra-efficient, ultra-small, and ultra-affordable optical sensors enabled by this research.