A novel single tapered fiber optical tweezers is proposed and fabricated by heating and drawing technology. The microscopic particle tapping performance of this special designed tapered fiber probe is demonstrated and investigated. The distribution of the optical field emerging from the tapered fiber tip is numerically calculated based on the beam propagation method. The trapping force FDTD analysis results, both axial and transverse, are also given.

A high-temperature sensor based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) in a conventional single-mode optical fiber is proposed and fabricated by concatenating two microcavities separated by a middle section. A femtosecond laser is used to fabricate a microhole on the center of a fiber end. Then a micro-air-cavity is formed by splicing the microholed fiber end with a normal fiber end. The interferometer is applied for high-temperature sensing, in the range of 500-1200 °C, with a sensitivity of 109 pm/°C that, to the best of our knowledge, is highest in silica fiber temperature sensors. Also, the interferometer is insensitive to external refractive index (RI), which is desirable for temperature sensors.

Selective doping of Ni2+ in octahedral sites provided by nanocrystals embedded in glass-ceramics (GCs) is crucial to the enhancement of broadband near-infrared (NIR) emission. In this work, a NIR emission with a full-width-at-half-maximum (FWHM) of 288 nm is first reported from ZnGa2O4: Ni2+ nano-spinels embedded GCs with excellent transparency. A comparison is made of the NIR luminescence properties of Ni2+ doped GCs containing ZnGa2O4, germanium-substituted ZnGa2O4 nano-spinels (Zn1+xGa2−2xGexO4), and Zn2GeO4/Li2Ge4O9 composite nanocrystals that are free of Ga3+. The results show that ZnGa2O4: Ni2+ GCs exhibit a significantly enhanced NIR emission. The incorporation of the nucleating agent TiO2 is favored in terms of the increased luminescence intensity and prolonged lifetime. The possible causes for the enhancement effect are identified from the crystal structure/defects viewpoint. The newly developed GCs incorporate good reproducibility to allow for a tolerance of thermal treatment temperature and hence hold great potential of fiberization via the recently proposed “melt-in-tube” method. They can be considered as promising candidates for broadband fiber amplifiers.

All-optical fiber sensors based on ultracompact fiber inline Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) are fabricated by side-ablating a U-shape microcavity in a single-mode optical fiber with the fiber core partially removed using femtosecond (fs) laser pulses, in which the two light paths are accordingly formed in the remaining D-type fiber core and the U-shape microcavity. Beam propagation method (BPM) analysis is utilized to illustrate the dependences of good transmission spectra on parameters including the ablation depth, ablation length and the refractive index of U-shape micocavity, which gives some guidelines to optimize parameters for fs laser micromachining and predicts RI (refractive index) sensitivities within given RI ranges. The modeling results of ultrahigh RI sensitivities for gases and solutions are -3243.75 ± 0.65nm/RIU (refractive index unit) and -10789.29 ± 18.91nm/RIU, respectively. In RI testing experiments, the sensor exhibits ultrahigh RI sensitivities of -3754.79 ± 44.24nm/RIU with refractive indices ranging from 1.0001143 to 1.0002187 by testing different mixture ratios of N2 and He gases, and -12162.01 ± 173.92nm/RIU with refractive indices ranging from 1.3330 to 1.33801 by testing different concentrations of sucrose solutions, which is essentially in agreement with the modeling results.

A taper-based Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) embedded in a thinned optical fiber is demonstrated as a highly sensitive refractive index (RI) sensor. A RI sensitivity of 2210.84 nm/RIU (refractive index unit) is obtained at the external RI of 1.40, which is ten times higher than that of normal taper- and long-period fiber grating (LPFG)-based sensors. The sensitivity can be further improved by decreasing the diameter of the thinned fiber and increasing the interferometer length of the MZI. The proposed MZIs have lower temperature sensitivities compared with normal fiber sensors, which is a desirable merit for RI sensors to reduce the cross sensitivity caused by thermal drift.

We propose and demonstrate a novel surface plasmon resonance (SPR)-sensing approach by using the fundamental mode beam based on a twin-core fiber (TCF). Although normally in a fiber SPR sensor, a multimode fiber (MMF) has often been used to improve the coupling efficiency; for improving fiber SPR sensor sensitivity, single-mode beam is optimal. We provide a novel method to employ the single (fundamental)-mode beam to SPR sense based on the TCF. We grind the TCF tip to be a frustum wedge shape, and plate a 50-nm sensing gold film on the end face, and two 500-nm reflected gold films on the side faces of the wedge tip. By using this new configuration, we reduce the mode noise effectively and get a high testing sensitivity (the testing highest sensitivity reaches to 6463 nm/RIU). This SPR probe can be applied in a microfluidic chip and monitors the refractive index (RI) charges of the flow liquid in the microfluidic channel in real-time. The probe successfully monitors the refractive index of liquid ranged from 1.3333 to 1.3706, and the average sensitivity reaches to 5213 nm/RIU in the solution, which is much higher than most multimode SPR systems.

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We propose and demonstrate a whispering gallery mode (WGM) resonance-based temperature sensor, where the microresonator is made of a DCM (2-[2-[4-(dimethylamino)phenyl] ethenyl]-6-methyl-4H-pyran-4-ylidene)-doped oil droplet (a liquid material) immersed in the water solution. The oil droplet is trapped, controlled, and located by a dual-fiber optical tweezers, which prevents the deformation of the liquid droplet. We excite the fluorescence and lasing in the oil droplet and measure the shifts of the resonance wavelength at different temperatures. The results show that the resonance wavelength redshifts when the temperature increases. The testing sensitivity is 0.377 nm/°C in the temperature range 25°C-45°C. The results of the photobleaching testing of the dye indicate that measured errors can be reduced by reducing the measured time. As far as we know, this is the first time a WGM temperature sensor with a liquid state microcavity has been proposed. Compared with the solid microresonator, the utilization of the liquid microresonator improves the thermal sensitivity and provides the possibility of sensing in liquid samples or integrating into the chemical analyzers and microfluidic systems.