Perfluorinated Plastic Optical Fiber Tapers for Evanescent Wave Sensing

In this work we describe the fabrication and the characterization of perfluorinated plastic-cladded optical fiber tapers. The heat-and-pull procedure has been used to fabricate symmetric tapers. Devices with different taper ratio have been produced and the repeatability of the process has been verified. The very low refractive indexes of the core-cladding perfluorinated polymers (n = 1.35-1.34) permit a strong enhancement of the evanescent wave power fraction in aqueous environments (n = 1.33), making them very attractive for evanescent wave sensing. The tapers have been characterized carrying out evanescent field absorbance measurements with different concentrations of methylene blue in water and fluorescence collection measurements in an aqueous solution containing Cy5 dye. A good sensitivity, tightly related to the low refractive index of the core-cladding materials and the geometrical profile, has been shown.