Improving the sensitivity of new passive optical fiber ring sensor based on meta-dielectric materials

Abstract

In this paper a new passive optical fiber sensor depends on surface plasmon resonance (SPR) decorate by fabricating a configuration on metal-dielectric materials. A single-mode fiber is applied to harness the transmission light. In this work, FDTD method is introduced to control the injected refractive index on ring and fiber; hence, this leads to the shifting of the fiber SPR resonance wavelength. The advantageous of this mechanism is optical fiber sensor has a high sensitivity with the maximum of up to 1700 nm/RIU, wide detection range of 1–1.4 RIU (refractive index unit), and a nanometer resolution with a minimum of 4 nm. In addition, moreover we consider several performance parameters like sensitivity and FOM, interestingly it is shown applying silicon optical fiber improve the sensitivity. Comparing with the reported numerical and measurements based on an optical fiber structure, the experimental results based on fiber ring resonator demonstrate good ability and agreement, therefore the proposed structure pave the path new operation of optical fiber sensors.