An integrated optical hydrogen sensor on a silicon-on-insulator platform: Effects of palladium film thickness

In this paper, we present the design and experimental demonstration of a silicon-on-insulator based optical hydrogen sensor. We analyze the response time, hysteresis and sensitivity of our device for various palladium film thicknesses. For a 1-nm thick palladium film the response time is approximately 6 s and the sensor suffers little from hysteresis effect. These attractive features make the sensor highly useful for a wide range of applications.