Novel approaches to realize plasmonic intrinsic and extrinsic optical fiber sensors with high sensitivity

Authors recall two high sensitive, small size, and low-cost surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors based on plastic optical fibers (POFs): the first one, a D-shaped SPR intrinsic POF sensor, the second one an SPR extrinsic POF sensor. These plasmonic POF sensors, intrinsic and extrinsic, combined with different kinds of specific receptors can be directly connected to an online platform by a software interface, allowing storing, analyzing and displaying the sensor's data, to realize low-cost biochemical sensors for several applications. The simple experimental setup, used for both these SPR POF sensor configurations, was arranged to measure the light spectrum transmitted through the plasmonic platform, exploiting a halogen lamp and a spectrometer connected to a PC.