Photonic integrated circuits for advanced sensing

从环境和社会经济的角度来看，开发新的传感器技术对加拿大至关重要。北方面临着气候变化的巨大挑战，而了解和监测其影响又受到能源制约的严重限制。加拿大有50万口活跃的威尔斯油井和100万公里的油气管道。高灵敏度和抗电磁干扰能力使光学传感器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。探测光子的光谱和偏振特性的科学进步导致了尖端的光学传感技术。然而，它们的应用由于缺乏适合于经济大规模生产的技术而受到混淆。本研究旨在解决这一问题。 这项研究计划提出了先进的高性能，芯片级光学传感器的硅光集成电路。硅光子学是一种颠覆性技术，有望在单个芯片上增加更多的复杂性，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产品集成使用既定的半导体工艺，使该技术在大量的应用中具有极大的吸引力。我们的研究成果将使光的多维特性（例如，偏振，相位，频率和强度）在一个微小的芯片上，这将有助于在环境监测，生物医学诊断和遥感领域的突破。对加拿大人的影响将通过这项研究实现的超高效、超小型和超经济实惠的光学传感器的变革性应用来体现。

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.