[INVITED] Optical microfibre devices

•In the last decade optical fibre tapers with micrometer diameter (often called microfibres) have been investigated for numerous applications ranging from sensing to wavelength convertors, telecom and optical manipulation. This paper reviews the various applications of microfibres.•Optical microfibres provide extraordinary advantage with respect to free space optics in terms of collection for quantum optics experiments.•Nonlinear wavelength conversion is extremely efficient in optical microfibers because of tailorability of both dispersion and effective index.•Optical microfibres found large number of applications in sensing because of their compact size and fast response time.

In the last decade optical fibre tapers with micrometre diameter (often called microfibers) have been investigated for numerous applications ranging from sensing to wavelength convertors, telecom and optical manipulation. This paper reviews the various applications of microfibres.