Ultrasensitive plasmonic sensing in air using optical fibre spectral combs

Christophe Caucheteur (), Tuan Guo (), Fu Liu, Bai-Ou Guan and Jacques Albert ()
Additional contact information
Christophe Caucheteur: University of Mons
Tuan Guo: Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical Fiber Sensing and Communications, Institute of Photonics Technology, Jinan University
Fu Liu: Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical Fiber Sensing and Communications, Institute of Photonics Technology, Jinan University
Bai-Ou Guan: Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical Fiber Sensing and Communications, Institute of Photonics Technology, Jinan University
Jacques Albert: Carleton University

Nature Communications, 2016, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: Abstract Surface plasmon polaritons (SPP) can be excited on metal-coated optical fibres, enabling the accurate monitoring of refractive index changes. Configurations reported so far mainly operate in liquids but not in air because of a mismatch between permittivities of guided light modes and the surrounding medium. Here we demonstrate a plasmonic optical fibre platform that overcomes this limitation. The underpinning of our work is a grating architecture—a gold-coated highly tilted Bragg grating—that excites a spectral comb of narrowband-cladding modes with effective indices near 1.0 and below. Using conventional spectral interrogation, we measure shifts of the SPP-matched resonances in response to static atmospheric pressure changes. A dynamic experiment conducted using a laser lined-up with an SPP-matched resonance demonstrates the ability to detect an acoustic wave with a resolution of 10−8 refractive index unit (RIU). We believe that this configuration opens research directions for highly sensitive plasmonic sensing in gas.

Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms13371 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:7:y:2016:i:1:d:10.1038_ncomms13371

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/ncomms13371

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().