Surface plasmon resonance based fiber optic refractive index sensors

Refractive index sensors based on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) in a thin metal film deposited on an unclad core of a multimode fiber are presented. The sensing element of the fiber optic SPR sensors is a bare core of a step-index optical fiber made of fused silica with a double-sided sputtered gold film. First, an in-line transmissionbased sensing scheme with the fiber optic SPR probe is used. Second, a reflection-based sensing scheme with a terminated fiber optic SPR probe is employed. The fiber optic SPR probes have different lengths and the thickness of the sputtered gold film is about 50 nm. Both sensing schemes utilize a wavelength interrogation method so that the refractive index of a liquid is sensed by measuring the position of the dip in the transmitted or reflected spectral intensity distribution. As an example, the aqueous solutions of ethanol with refractive indices in a range from 1.333 to 1.364 are measured. For the transmission-based sensing scheme a polarization-dependent response is revealed.