Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Caucheteur, Christophe
• Guo, Tuan
• Liu, Fu
• Guan, Bai-Ou
• Albert, Jacques

Titel

Ultrasensitive plasmonic sensing in air using optical fibre spectral combs

Ist Teil von

• Nature communications, 2016-11, Vol.7 (1), p.13371-13371, Article 13371

Ort / Verlag

England: Nature Publishing Group

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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 refractive index unit (RIU). We believe that this configuration opens research directions for highly sensitive plasmonic sensing in gas.