Liquid-filled hollow core microstructured polymer optical fiber

Abstract

Guidance in a liquid core is possible with microstructured optical fibers, opening up many possibilities for chemical and biochemical fiber-optic sensing. In this work we demonstrate how the bandgaps of a hollow core microstructured polymer optical fiber scale with the refractive index of liquid introduced into the holes of the microstructure. Such a fiber is then filled with an aqueous solution of (-)-fructose, and the resulting optical rotation measured. Hence, we show that hollow core microstructured polymer optical fibers can be used for sensing, whilst also fabricating a chiral optical fiber based on material chirality, which has many applications in its own right.

Simple analysis of water-filled hollow-core silica photonic bandgap fiber

“…[3,4] Liquid crystals or flint glass [13] are candidates as high index materials for filling the cladding holes. The hole pitch and thus the hole diameter can be enlarged by using a high order bandgap.…”

“…At the same time, it is expected that high performance optical devices will be achieved by filling the holes in the PBF with various materials. Liquid crystal photonic bandgap fiber is being investigated to realize tunable optical devices [3,4] whose core and cladding holes are filled with liquid crystal.…”

Application Specific Optical Fibers

“…With the emergence of the concept of PBGs in the context of photonic crystals there has been a resurgence of interest in air-core Bragg fibers as an alternative PBG fiber platform for a variety of applications. The first report on a solid silica-core Bragg fiber appeared in 2000 [Brechet et al, 2000], which aimed to achieve zero GVD at wavelengths shorter than conventional telecommunication wavelength windows; in addition, liquidfilled polymer-based Bragg fibers [Cox et al, 2006;Pone et al, 2006], and hollow/low-index core Bragg fibers Skorobogatiy, 2005] also attracted attention because they exhibit diverse propagation characteristics. Bragg fibers with relatively large refractive index difference between its core material and cladding layer materials could essentially be modeled like planar stacks of periodic thin films of alternating materials, similar to an interference filter .…”

Refractive Index Sensing in an All-Solid Twin-Core Photonic Bandgap Fiber

“…Bandgap guiding fibers have also been manufactured in polymer [37]. Importantly, polymer is less brittle and much easier to functionalize than silica, and hence polymer MOFs are usually preferred for biosensing applications [38], [39]. Polymer microstructured fibers have most commonly been fabricated in polymethylmethacrylate (PMMA), nevertheless other polymers also show promise; for example, TOPAS polymer MOFs have been fabricated and shown to have advantageous properties for both fiber drawing and biosensing [40], [41] and for guiding in the terahertz regime [42].…”