Graphene Oxide Effect on Improvement of Silver Surface Plasmon Resonance D-Shaped Optical Fiber Sensor

This research focuses on the side-polished Single-Mode Optical Fibers (SMOF) as refractive index (RI) sensor utilizing properties of Surface Plasmon Resonance. The SMOF with cladding stripped off shows a D-shaped optical fiber with high sensitivity functionalization. Here we show silver protected by graphene oxide (GO) as viable candidates. A few layers of GO on top of silver thin layer were applied as a material to overcome silver coating degradation process. This silver/GO sensor was characterized using various RIs of analyte likely deionized water and alcohol solutions. Sensor with GO has shown fast response and high sensitivity in respect of RI, where sensitivity increases in range from 1.30 to 1.34 RIU (refractive index unit). This device shows highest sensitivity of up to 833.33 nm/ RIU. The polishing process using SMOF stops at few microns above the core of the fiber with the drop of output power fixed to be 1 dB as an indication to standardize the amount of cladding been removed. The thickness of 30 nm Ag was deposited using electron beam evaporation method on D-shaped optical fiber with subsequent protected layer of GO in solutions form. The use of COMSOL Multiphysics has also been carried out to observe numerical findings. The response of the GO has shown a sensitivity improvement which proves new promising approaches for the newly developed sensors. © 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston.