GaN Photonic Crystal-Based, Enhanced Fluorescence Biomolecule Detection System

The need for small form factor, portable biosensing platforms is prevalent across a wide range of medical, environmental, and defense applications. This paper presents the design of a novel, integrated optofluidic photonic crystal biosensor architecture that shows potential for meeting the single molecule detection requirements of these application areas. GaN is being targeted as the photonic crystal slab material due to its transparency in the visible spectral range and also the potential for creating high aspect ratio photonic crystal lattices via polarity inverted MBE growth. Results of optical modeling efforts indicating 10-15x resonant enhancement of fluorescent emission and polarity inversion GaN growth techniques will be discussed.