Photonic integrated circuits for advanced sensing

从环境和社会经济的角度来看，新传感器技术的发展对加拿大至关重要。北方面临着气候变化的巨大挑战，而对其影响的理解和监测受到能源限制的严重限制。加拿大有50万口活跃油井和100万公里的输油管道，用于收集和分配石油和天然气。光学传感器具有高灵敏度和抗电磁干扰能力，非常适合能源运输和分布式制造，用于危害控制、质量评估和低碳排放处理。探测光子光谱和偏振特性的科学进步带来了尖端的光学传感技术。然而，由于缺乏经济批量生产的技术，它们的应用一直受到阻碍。本研究旨在解决这一问题。本研究计划旨在推动矽光集成电路的发展，以实现高性能的晶片级光学感测器。硅光子学是一项颠覆性技术，它有望在单个芯片上塞入更多的复杂性，同时大幅降低光通信和传感器系统的能耗、占地面积和成本。此外，硅光子芯片可以很容易地与先进的电子设备集成，使用既定的半导体工艺，使该技术在大量的应用中非常有吸引力。我们的研究成果将使微型芯片能够前所未有地覆盖光的多维特性（例如偏振，相位，频率和强度），这将有助于在环境监测，生物医学诊断和遥感领域取得突破。通过这项研究实现的超高效、超小、超实惠的光学传感器的变革性应用，将对加拿大人产生影响。

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.