We report a fiber-optic sensor based on a silicon Fabry-Pérot cavity, fabricated by attaching a silicon pillar on the tip of a single-mode fiber, for high-resolution and high-speed temperature measurement. The large thermo-optic coefficient and thermal expansion coefficient of the silicon material give rise to an experimental sensitivity of 84.6 pm/°C. The excellent transparency and large refractive index of silicon over the infrared wavelength range result in a visibility of 33 dB for the reflection spectrum. A novel average wavelength tracking method has been proposed and demonstrated for sensor demodulation with improved signal-to-noise ratio, which leads to a temperature resolution of 6 × 10⁻⁴ °C. Due to the high thermal diffusivity of silicon, a response time as short as 0.51 ms for a sensor with an 80-µm-diameter and 200-µm-long silicon pillar has been experimentally achieved, suggesting a maximum frequency of ~2 kHz can be reached, to address the needs for highly dynamic environmental variations such as those found in the ocean.

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We propose and study an optical microfiber coupler (OMC) sensor working near the turning point of effective group index difference between the even supermode and odd supermode to achieve high refractive index (RI) sensitivity. Theoretical calculations reveal that infinite sensitivity can be obtained when the measured RI is close to the turning point value. This diameter-dependent turning point corresponds to the condition that the effective group index difference equals zero. To validate our proposed sensing mechanism, we experimentally demonstrate an ultrahigh sensitivity of 39541.7 nm/RIU at a low ambient RI of 1.3334 based on an OMC with the diameter of 1.4 lm. An even higher sensitivity can be achieved by carrying out the measurements at RI closer to the turning point. The resulting ultrasensitive RI sensing platform offers a substantial impact on a variety of applications from high performance trace analyte detection to small molecule sensing.

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