Experimental and theoretical studies on localized surface plasmon resonance based fiber optic sensor using graphene oxide coated silver nanoparticles

An optical fiber based refractive index sensor using graphene oxide (GO) encapsulated silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) is reported. The AgNPs are encapsulated with a very thin layer of GO as it controls the inter-particle distance thereby preventing aggregation. The encapsulation also enhances the colloidal stability and prevents the oxidation of the AgNPs by separating them from direct contact with the aqueous medium. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy results support the formation of 1 nm thick GO around AgNPs of an average size of 35 nm. A Raman spectrometer and a UV-VIS spectrometer have been used to characterize and study the synthesized nanoparticles along with GO. Further, Raman spectra support a 64.72% increase in D-peak intensity and a 52.91% increase in G-peak intensity of the GO-encapsulated AgNPs (GOE-AgNPs) with respect to GO. Further, the GOE-AgNPs are immobilized on the core of functionalized plastic-cladded silica fiber. FESEM confirms the immobilization of the GOE-AgNPs on the fiber core. We observed that the peak absorbance changes by 87.55% with a 0.05 change in the refractive index. The sensitivity of the proposed fiber sensor is found to be 0.9406 Delta A/RIU along with a resolution of 12.8 x 10(-4) RIU. MATLAB is used to calculate the absorbance of the AgNPs by considering the bound and free electron contribution along with the size-dependent dispersion of the nanoparticles. We found that the simulation results are in good agreement with the experimental results.