A scalable pathway to nanostructured sapphire optical fiber for evanescent-field sensing and beyond

Hui Chen, Fei Tian, Jiri Kanka, Henry Du

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

29 Scopus citations

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish
Article number111102
JournalApplied Physics Letters
Volume106
Issue number11
DOIs
StatePublished - 16 Mar 2015

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