Simulation of Optical Microfiber Loop Resonators for Ambient Refractive Index Sensing 英文参考文献.docVIP

Sensors 2007, 7, 689-696 sensors ISSN 1424-8220 ? 2007 by MDPI /sensors Full Research Paper Simulation of Optical Microfiber Loop Resonators for Ambient Refractive Index Sensing Lei Shi, Yonghao Xu, Wei Tan and Xianfeng Chen* Department of Physics, the State Key Laboratory on Fiber Optic Local Area Communication Networks and Advanced Optical Communication Systems, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China * Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; E-mail: xfchen@ Received: 4 April 2007 / Accepted: 3 May 2007 / Published: 24 May 2007 Abstract: Based on theoretical modeling and optimization, we exploit the application of optical microfiber loop resonators in ambient refractive index sensing. We set up a reliable theoretical model and optimize the structural parameters of microfiber loop resonators including the radius of the microrfiber, the radius of the loop and the length of the coupling region for higher sensitivity, wider dynamic measurement range, and lower detection limit. To show the convincible and realizable sensing ability we perform the simulation of sensing an extreme small variation of ambient refractive index by employing a set of experimental data as the parameters in the expression of intensity transmission coefficient, and the detection limit reaches to a variation of ambient refractive index of 10 -5 refractive index unit (RIU). This has superiority over the existing evanescent field-based subwavelength-diameter optical fiber refractive index sensor. Keywords: Fiber optics sensors; Optical resonators; Subwavelength-diameter optical fibers. 1. Introduction Recently optical waveguides with subwavelength diameter attract much attention, especially optical microfiber-based photonic devices [1-6]. Fabrication methods of ultra-high-quality silica optical microfibers with length up to ~10cm and diameter down to ~30nm have been develop