Contactless optical fiber refractive index sensor for liquid and solid samples

We report on a contactless optical fiber refractive index (RI) sensor that can be used to measure the RI of solid or liquid samples. The sensor is simple to construct and consists of a Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) with long cavity. The cavity of our FPI consists of a tapered optical fiber tip and an external flat mirror. The output beam of the fiber tip is partially reflected from different interfaces of the sample present in the interferometer cavity. Each of such reflections interferes with the beam internally reflected by the fiber tip. Thus, a multiple-beam FPI is formed whose reflection spectrum is composed by the superposition of several two-beam interferences. The analysis of the multiple interference spectra was carried out in the Fourier domain Several glass samples, water-sucrose and water-glycerol solutions were prepared and tested. Since the fiber tip is not in direct contact with the sample under test the measurement is simple and immediate. To our-knowledge, this is the first time that a fiber optic sensor can be used to measure the RI of solid and liquid samples without any modification.