Improved gas sensor with air-core photonic bandgap fiber

Abstract

The propagation loss of a fiber can be increased by coupling core mode and surface mode which will deteriorate the performance of photonic bandgap fiber (PBGF). In this paper, we presented an air-core PBGF for gas sensing applications. By designing Λ = 2.63 µm, d = 0.95 Λ, and R_core= 1.13 Λ, where Λ is the distance between the adjacent air holes, the fiber was single-mode, no surface mode was supported with fiber, and more than 90% of the optical power was confined in the core. Furthermore, with optimizing the fiber structural parameters, at wavelength of λ = 1.55 µm that is in acetylene gas absorption line, significant relative sensitivity of 92.5%, and acceptable confinement loss of 0.09 dB/m, were simultaneously achieved.

Keywords

gas sensor / photonic bandgap fiber (PBGF) / sensitivity / surface modes / air core radius / confinement loss

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Acknowledgments

This research was based on work done at Nano-Photonics and Optoelectronics Research Laboratory (NORLab) at Shahid Rajaee Teacher Training University, Tehran, Iran. The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments and recommendations, which considerably improved the contents and the presentation of the manuscript. They also would like to thank Iran Nanotechnology Initiative Council (INIC) for financial support.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg