New fiber optic sensor: application to refractive index sensing

Optical fibers are more and more used as chemical sensors. This is, mainly due to their low cost, and their high efficiency to work in harsh and remote environments. Many devices are based on thin film plasmon excitation where a metal coating is evaporated onto the core of an etched optical fiber. In this paper, a new sensor configuration is presented. Instead of exciting surface plasmon waves on a thin film, surface plasma waves are excited on metal islands. The fiber is coated with 3 layers of gold. Each layer is annealed before the next layer is evaporated onto it. This is done to avoid any light leakage, fact which was found on a prior version with only one gold coating. Different sets of fibers were tested and sensitive and reproducible results for liquid with refraction indices varying from 1.3 to 1.7 were obtained.