Lateral access to the holes of photonic crystal fibers – selective filling and sensing applications

Abstract

A new, simple, technique is demonstrated to laterally access the cladding holes of solid-core photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) or the central hole of hollow-core PCFs by blowing a hole through the fiber wall (using a fusion splicer and the application of pressure). For both fiber types material was subsequently and successfully inserted into the holes. The proposed method compares favorably with other reported selective filling techniques in terms of simplicity and reproducibility. Also, since the holes are laterally filled, simultaneous optical access to the PCFs is possible, which can prove useful for practical sensing applications. As a proof-of-concept experiment, Rhodamine fluorescence measurements are shown.

Exposed-core microstructured optical fibers for real-time fluorescence sensing

“…To the best of our knowledge this is the first demonstration of glass exposed-core microstructured optical fiber produced directly from fiber drawing. The length of fiber produced from a single draw for both trial #3 and #4 was the order of 200 m, which is a significant improvement on previous pointwise methods where reported lengths of the exposed region include 64µm [12] and 20 µm [13].…”

“…The exposed-core fiber was first proposed in 2003 by Hoo et al [10] and fabrication has since been demonstrated by the use of a fusion splicer and air pressure to blow holes within an MOF [12], use of a focused ion beam [13,14], and femtosecond laser micromachining [15,16]. Also, tapering of MOFs can allow access to the guided optical field [17].…”

Design and Optimization of Highly Sensitive Photonic Crystal Fiber with Low Confinement Loss for Ethanol Detection

“…In recent years, the concept of filling liquids or gasses in the core or cladding region has attracted much attention to the researchers for chemical sensing applications. The research article (Cordeiro et al, 2006a) proposed a PCF in which both core and cladding were a microstructure and it enhanced the evanescent field, infiltrating it with a liquid sample. This concept offers a great potentiality to broaden the field of liquid sensing applications.…”

Polarization-maintaining photonic-crystal-fiber-based all-optical polarimetric torsion sensor

“…In particular, sensing applications using PCFs have also been widely explored. However, most research efforts mainly exploit PCF characteristics to realize gas/liquid sensors with guided-wave/evanescent-wave interaction [1][2][3][4][5]. It has been established that PCF-based optical fiber sensors offer extraordinary sensitivity for gas/liquid monitoring.…”