Large-area silicon photonic crystal supporting bound states in the continuum and optical sensing formed by nanoimprint lithography

Optical bound states in the continuum (BIC) are found in various dielectric, plasmonic and hybrid photonic systems. The localized BIC modes and quasi-BIC resonances can result in a large near-field enhancement and a high-quality factor with low optical loss. They represent a very promising class of ultrasensitive nanophotonic sensors. Usually, such quasi-BIC resonances can be carefully designed and realized in the photonic crystal that is precisely sculptured by electron beam lithography or interference lithography. Here, we report quasi-BIC resonances in large-area silicon photonic crystal slabs formed by soft nanoimprinting lithography and reactive ion etching. Such quasi-BIC resonances are extremely tolerant to fabrication imperfections while the optical characterization can be performed over macroscopic area by simple transmission measurements. By introducing lateral and vertical dimension changes during the etching process, the quasi-BIC resonance can be tuned over a wide range with the highest experimental quality factor of 136. We observe an ultra-high sensitivity of 1703 nm per RIU and a figure-of-merit of 65.5 for refractive index sensing. A good spectral shift is observed for detecting glucose solution concentration changes and adsorption of monolayer silane molecules. Our approach involves low-cost fabrication and easy characterization process for large-area quasi-BIC devices, which might enable future realistic optical sensing applications.