Inhibited coupling guiding hollow fibers for label-free DNA detection

Abstract

The potentialities in using hollow core tube lattice fibers based on inhibited coupling wave-guiding for label-free DNA detection are numerically investigated and discussed here. The proposed sensing approach does not require any additional transducer component such as Bragg gratings, amplifying techniques such as nanoparticles nor coherent sources. It simply consists of the measurement of the transmittance of a piece of fiber some ten centimeters long. In case of matching DNA sequence, an additional bio-layer is laid down the dielectric-air interface causing a red shift of the transmission spectrum of the fiber. Results show a spectral sensitivity on the bio-layer with shift as high as 42 nm for every 10 nm of bio-layer and robustness against imperfect fiber coupling. The proposed approach can be easily applied to sensing of other complex molecular structures where the presence/absence of analyte can generate or not an additional layer.

A simple analytical model for confinement loss estimation in hollow-core Tube Lattice Fibers

“…Since they were first proposed [1], and then experimentally demonstrated [2], single-ring Tube Lattice Fibers (TLFs) have been showing extremely interesting optical properties, making them good candidates as hollow-core low-loss broadband fibers for applications from the terahertz band [3,4] to visible and ultraviolet wavelengths [5,6], including the mid-infrared [7,8] spectral range. More recently they have proved to be also a good platform for sensing [9][10][11].…”

Analytical Formulas for Dispersion and Effective Area in Hollow-Core Tube Lattice Fibers

“…Since their first demonstration [1], hollow-core fibers have been opening up plenty of opportunities in several photonic applications [2][3][4], such as high-power delivery [5,6], broadband, and super-continuum generation [7,8], and sensing [9][10][11]. Hollow-core (HC) wave-guiding can be obtained by exploiting either the absence of cladding modes, as in photonic-bandgap fibers (PBGFs), or the spatial frequency mismatch, combined with minimal spatial overlap between cladding modes and core mode, as in inhibited-coupling fibers (ICFs) [6,7,12,13], also known as anti-resonant fibers [14,15].…”

Tailoring modal properties of inhibited-coupling guiding fibers by cladding modification

“…In this framework, research papers have been published on the optimization of SR-TL HCPCF design to reduce confinement and bend losses [6][7][8], to study their modal content and to achieve single-mode operation [6,9,10]. Additionally, one can find in the literature a set of investigations on the use of such fibers in applied fields as in mid-IR lasers [11], generation of singlecycle pulses [12], and sensing [13].…”