In the past decade, whispering gallery microcavities have been emerging as powerful tools for nanodetection and biosensing. This talk reviews experimental and numerical techniques for whispering gallery microcavity sensing. On the experiment side, an overview of sensing techniques such as reactive, mode splitting, active and plasmonic enhanced sensing along with the reference interferometric enhancement will be discussed. In particular, optomechanical sensing down to single molecule resolution will be presented in detail. On the numerical side, modelling techniques such as beam propagation, mode matching and boundary element methods and their applications to simulating wave propagating behavior in microcavities will also be discussed.

报告人简介：Tao Lu received his B.Sc. degree from the Department of Physics, University of Manitoba in 1995, his M.Sc. degree from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Queen's University at Kingston in 1998 and his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Physics, University of Waterloo, in 2005. He has worked in industry with various companies including Nortel Networks, Kymata Canada, Peleton etc., on optical communications. Before joining UVic, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Applied Physics, California Institute of Technology from 2006 to 2008. His research interests include optical microcavities and their applications to ultra narrow linewidth laser source, bio and nano photonics.