A polarimetric sensor based on nanoporous free standing membranes

A polarimetric sensor with state of the art sensitivity is developed using free standing porous silicon membranes. The use of an optimized etching receipt greatly reduces the pore roughness. Depolarization factors are thus limited and material birefringence is increased. Free standing membranes are fabricated in n-type substrates and characterized both from the optical and structural point of view. The proposed approach is fully CMOS compatible and can therefore pave the way to the development of cheap microarray that exploits multiplexing capabilities while keeping the amount of analyte required by the analysis down to the microliter level.