Physics Commons^™

Evanescent Field Absorption Sensing Using Sapphire Fibers, Michael Grossman

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the application of coiled sapphire multimode optical fibers for evanescent wave chemical sensing in both the visible spectrum and the near infrared. As has been suggested in the literature pertaining to silica fibers, bending converts low-order modes to high order ones, which leads to more evanescent absorption and thus a more sensitive chemical detector. By coiling the fiber many times, it was expected that even greater sensitivity would be attained.

Experiments were performed to investigate the sensor response to different solutions and to characterize this response. In the first of three experiments, the large absorption peak of …