TY - JOUR
T1 - A scalable pathway to nanostructured sapphire optical fiber for evanescent-field sensing and beyond
AU - Chen, Hui
AU - Tian, Fei
AU - Kanka, Jiri
AU - Du, Henry
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.
PY - 2015/3/16
Y1 - 2015/3/16
N2 - We here report an innovative and scalable strategy of transforming a commercial unclad sapphire optical fiber to an all-alumina nanostructured sapphire optical fiber (NSOF). The strategy entails fiber coating with metal aluminum followed by anodization to form alumina cladding of highly organized pore channel structure. Through experiments and numerical simulation, we demonstrate the utility and benefit of NSOF, analogous to all-silica microstructured optical fiber, for evanescent-field surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) measurements. We experimentally reveal the feasibility of Ag nanoparticles (NPs)-enabled NSOF SERS sensing of 10-6 M Rhodamine 6G (R6G) after thermal treatment at 500 °C for 6 h by taking advantage of porous anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) structure to stabilize the Ag NPs. We show, via numerical simulations, that AAO cladding significantly increases the evanescent-field overlap, lower porosity of AAO results in higher evanescent-field overlap, and optimized AAO nanostructure yields greater SERS enhancement.
AB - We here report an innovative and scalable strategy of transforming a commercial unclad sapphire optical fiber to an all-alumina nanostructured sapphire optical fiber (NSOF). The strategy entails fiber coating with metal aluminum followed by anodization to form alumina cladding of highly organized pore channel structure. Through experiments and numerical simulation, we demonstrate the utility and benefit of NSOF, analogous to all-silica microstructured optical fiber, for evanescent-field surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) measurements. We experimentally reveal the feasibility of Ag nanoparticles (NPs)-enabled NSOF SERS sensing of 10-6 M Rhodamine 6G (R6G) after thermal treatment at 500 °C for 6 h by taking advantage of porous anodic aluminum oxide (AAO) structure to stabilize the Ag NPs. We show, via numerical simulations, that AAO cladding significantly increases the evanescent-field overlap, lower porosity of AAO results in higher evanescent-field overlap, and optimized AAO nanostructure yields greater SERS enhancement.
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U2 - 10.1063/1.4915325
DO - 10.1063/1.4915325
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84925013835
SN - 0003-6951
VL - 106
JO - Applied Physics Letters
JF - Applied Physics Letters
IS - 11
M1 - 111102
ER -