August 2018
Spotlight Summary by Paul Steinvurzel
Nanotrimer enhanced optical fiber tips implemented by electron beam lithography
Wang and co-authors use standard planar electron beam lithography techniques to fabricate plasmonic nanosensors on single mode optical fiber tips. Optical fibers are the most reliable and easiest-to-use platform for light delivery, so fabricating sensing structures directly on a fiber tip is a very attractive approach for making compact, mechanically robust devices. To date, this has been done on individual fiber tips by contact transfer, where the nanostructure is fabricated on a planar substrate and picked up by a fiber tip like a sticker, or by lithography, where the lithography steps had to be modified to accommodate the non-planar geometry of fibers.
The authors of this Spotlight article created a custom holder for an end facet-polished bundle of single mode fibers, allowing parallel fabrication of plasmonic nanodot arrays on several fibers at once. The prepared sample was compatible with their spin-coater, e-beam writer, and reactive ion etcher, making fabrication possible with a standard lithography setup. The measured extinction of the nanoarray on fiber was higher than the extinction of the same structure fabricated on a planar substrate. This work shows how current wafer-based manufacturing technologies can be adapted to produce fiber-coupled plasmonic near-field sensors.
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The authors of this Spotlight article created a custom holder for an end facet-polished bundle of single mode fibers, allowing parallel fabrication of plasmonic nanodot arrays on several fibers at once. The prepared sample was compatible with their spin-coater, e-beam writer, and reactive ion etcher, making fabrication possible with a standard lithography setup. The measured extinction of the nanoarray on fiber was higher than the extinction of the same structure fabricated on a planar substrate. This work shows how current wafer-based manufacturing technologies can be adapted to produce fiber-coupled plasmonic near-field sensors.
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Article Information
Nanotrimer enhanced optical fiber tips implemented by electron beam lithography
Ning Wang, Matthias Zeisberger, Uwe Hübner, and Markus A. Schmidt
Opt. Mater. Express 8(8) 2246-2255 (2018) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF