Simultaneous Plasmonic Measurement of Refractive Index and Temperature Based on a D-Type Fiber Sensor With Gold Wires

Abstract

This paper presents an optical fiber sensor, that uses surface plasmon resonance on metallic wires to directly and simultaneously measure both the refractive index and the temperature. The sensor is constituted by gold wires on a D-type fiber engineered, using numerical simulations based on the finite-element method to support plasmon modes with strong dependencies to either one of the measured parameters. In particular, the influence of the temperature on the structure of the plasmon modes results from contributions from the thermooptic effect in the fiber core and sensing layer, and phononelectron scattering along with electron-electron scattering in the metal wire. The performance of the sensor is evaluated in terms of its sensitivity and resolution.