High-Sensitivity Bistable Biosensor Based on the Photonic Crystal Fabry-Pérot Cavity with Weyl Semimetal

Optical bistability (OB) with low threshold and high tunability is crucial for advanced photonic devices. This work theoretically investigates low-threshold and tunable OB in a one-dimensional photonic crystal Fabry-Pérot (FP) cavity embedded with a Weyl semimetal (WSM) layer. By combining the local field enhancement of the cavity and the large third-order nonlinear refractive index of the WSM, we achieve OB in the terahertz regime with a low threshold of ~105 V/m. Furthermore, the OB threshold and hysteresis width can be flexibly manipulated via the Fermi energy of WSM, incident angle, photonic crystal period, the refractive index of the dielectric inside the cavity, and the position of the WSM inside the FP cavity. Moreover, based on the high sensitivity of switching thresholds to refractive index and displacement variations, we also propose a dual-parameter sensing scheme. This exhibits excellent sensing performance for gas sensing (sensitivity up to 96.48 × 105 V/m·RIU) and high sensitivity for displacement sensing (0.91 × 106 V/m·μm). We believe that the above results can provide reference schemes for nonlinear photonic devices.