Chemical sensor based on a solid-core photonic crystal fiber interferometer

Abstract

Photonic crystal fiber interferometers are used in many sensing applications. In this work, an in-reflection photonic crystal fiber (PCF) based on Mach-Zehnder (micro-holes collapsing) (MZ) interferometer, which exhibits high sensitivity to different volatile organic compounds (VOCs), without the needing of any permeable material. The interferometer is robust, compact, and consists of a stub photonic crystal fiber of large-mode area, photonic crystal fiber spliced to standard single mode fiber (SMF) (corning-28), this splicing occurs with optimized splice loss 0.19 dB In the splice regions the voids of the holey fiber are completely collapsed, which allows the excitation and recombination of core and cladding modes. The device reflection spectrum exhibits a sinusoidal interference pattern which shifts differently when the voids of the PCF are infiltrated with VOC molecules. The volume of voids responsible for the shift is less than 5microliters whereas the detectable levels are in the nanomole range. Laser diode with a wavelength 1550nm has been used as a pump light source. Two types of chemical liquids used (N-Hexane, and Propanol). The detection limits of our device associated with the maximum shifts of the wavelength is 4.4 nm for N-Hexane vapor when the length of the head sensor 20mm. In this work, the maximum sensitivity obtained of volatile organic compounds is 15420 nm/mol at the vapor of N-Hexane.