Resonant photonic
sensors are enjoying much attention based on
the worldwide drive toward personalized healthcare diagnostics and
the need to better monitor the environment. Recent developments exploiting
novel concepts such as metasurfaces, bound states in the continuum,
and topological sensing have added to the interest in this topic.
The drive toward increasingly higher quality (Q)-factors,
combined with the requirement for low costs, makes it critical to
understand the impact of realistic limitations such as losses on photonic
sensors. Traditionally, it is assumed that the reduction in the Q-factor sufficiently accounts for the presence of loss.
Here, we highlight that this assumption is overly simplistic, and
we show that losses have a stronger impact on the resonance amplitude
than on the Q-factor. We note that the effect of
the resonance amplitude has been largely ignored in the literature,
and there is no physical model clearly describing the relationship
between the limit of detection (LOD), Q-factor, and
resonance amplitude. We have, therefore, developed a novel, ab initio
analytical model, where we derive the complete figure of merit for
resonant photonic sensors and determine their LOD. In addition to
highlighting the importance of the optical losses and the resonance
amplitude, we show that, counter-intuitively, optimization of the
LOD is not achieved by maximization of the Q-factor
but by counterbalancing the Q-factor and amplitude.
We validate the model experimentally, put it into context, and show
that it is essential for applying novel sensing concepts in realistic
scenarios.