A reflective fiber-optic refractive index sensor based on multimode interference in a coreless silica fiber

A reflective fiber-optic refractive index (RI) sensor based on multimode interference (MMI) is presented and investigated in this paper. The sensor is made by splicing a small section of coreless silica fiber (CSF) to the standard single mode fiber (SMF). A wide-angle beam propagation method (WA-BPM) is employed for numerical simulation and design of the proposed RI sensor. Based on the simulation results, a RI sensor with a length of 1.7 cm of CSF is fabricated and experimentally studied. Experimental results show that the characteristic wavelength shift has an approximately linear relationship with the RI of the sample. A sensitivity of 141 nm/RIU (refractive index unit) and a resolution of 2.8×10−5 are obtained in the RI range from 1.33 to 1.38. As the RI value is higher than 1.38, the sensitivity of the sensor increase rapidly as the RI increase and a maximum sensitivity of 1561 nm/RIU can be achieved, corresponding to a resolution of 2.6×10−6. The experimental results fit well with the numerical simulation results.