Optical fiber sensor based on capillary wall for highly-sensitive refractive index measurement

This paper reports a temperature-compensated fiber-optic refractive index (RI) sensor for high sensitivity measurement. The sensor includes a piece of fused-silica capillary (FSC) and a fiber Bragg grating (FBG), both of which are sandwiched by single-mode fibers (SMFs). When light from the lead-in SMF enters into the wall of the FSC that acts as a RI sensing element, multiple modes are excited and interfere to form fringes collected by the lead-out SMF. The FBG is fabricated adjunct to the FSC to compensate its temperature sensitivity. The FSC based sensor prototype is fabricated and sealed in a flow cell to test its performance. Experimental results show that the sensor is highly sensitive to RI, and the sensitivity in the tested RI range from 1.33 to 1.35 is 698.52 nm/RIU and from 1.35 to 1.37 is 1061.78 nm/RIU. The temperature sensitivity of the FSC is −0.173 nm/°C, which is compensated by the FBG. This capillary wall based sensor can be further developed as a miniaturized fiber optic biosensor for biochemical application.