Refractive sensor

Another early fiber optic refractive "sensor" was the one for measurement of temperature and salinity variations of sea water31. The sensing region consisted of a partly uncovered light guide. It detects salinity variations in water of known temperature, and temperature variations in water of known salinity with an accuracy of +/- 2 g/L and 1 °C, respectively, at NaCl concentrations of 300 g/L. 

Optical Coatings. Thin surface coatings are appHed to optical components to improve performance. Wideband antireflection coatings for the visible and ir regions need materials with a refractive iadex of for the best efficieacy. Cerium fluoride, a stable material resistant to humidity damage, has a suitable iadex, 1.63 ia the visible, 1.59 ia the iafrared, and is transparent over the range 0.5 p.m to 5 p.m. It is one of the compounds used to build up the multilayers deposited on lenses, sensors, and the like. 

The flow sensitivity of a detector will also be one of the factors that determines the long term noise and thus will influence the sensitivity or minimum detectable concentration of the detector.lt is usually measured as the change in detector output for unit change in flow rate through the sensor cell. Again, the refractive index detector is the most sensitive to flow rate changes. 

Specifications for modem detectors in HPLC are given by Hanai [538] and comprise spectroscopic detectors (UV, F, FUR, Raman, RID, ICP, AAS, AES), electrochemical detectors (polarography, coulometry, (pulsed) amperometry, conductivity), mass spectromet-ric and other devices (FID, ECD, ELSD, ESR, NMR). None of these detectors meets all the requirement criteria of Table 4.40. The four most commonly used HPLC detectors are UV (80%), electrochemical, fluorescence and refractive index detectors. As these detectors are several orders of magnitude less sensitive than their GC counterparts, sensor contamination is not so severe, and... 

Figure 7.9. Schematic diagram of a surface plasmon resonance biosensor. One of the binding partners is immobilized on the sensor surface. With the BIACORE instrument, the soluble molecule is allowed to flow over the immobilized molecule. Binding of the soluble molecule results in a change in the refractive index of the solvent near the surface of the sensor chip. The magnitude of the shift in refractive index is related quantitatively to the amount of the soluble molecule that is bound.

The affinity (interaction strength), multiple interactions, and the changes in concentration can be also monitored from those studies. To deliver data in real time, the natural phenomenon of surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is employed. Since the refractive index (r ) at the interface changes as molecules are immobilized on the sensor surface, instant measure of r provides real-time assessment. The Tlcxchip platform exploits grating-coupled SPR (GC-SPR) for this purpose. 

Consequently, mirror optics are more common, in particular in the mid-IR. The mirrors used are usually aluminium- or gold-coated flat or curved substrates. While near-IR mirrors are usually protected by thin SiO-layers, in the mid-IR unprotected mirrors have to be used. Disadvantages of mirror optics are the elevated space consumption and the higher prices in comparison to refractive optics, especially comparing non-standard mirrors against non-standard lens. In total, mirror optics are so preferable to fibres and refractive optics, at least in the mid-IR, that in some technical applications they are used to replace waveguides to transport IR radiation between source, sensor head and spectrometer. 

Figure 7. Concept of optical sensor based on spectroscopy of guided modes. A change in the refractive index alters propagation constant of a guided mode.

Figures 13(a) and 13(b) illustrate the intensity distributions for two environment/substrate combinations, namely air/glass and water/glass. It can be concluded that the dipole located at a dielectric surface preferably radiates into the higher refractive index substrate at angles close to the critical angle. The intensity radiated into the environment is, on the other hand, relatively small. Yet it is this fraction of the fluorescence intensity that forms the basis of the sensor signal in conventional systems such as the optical biosensor...

In this paper we start with a short introduction in Integrated Optics (section 2), continue with an introduction into 10 sensors (section 3), while main attention will be paid to treating (the design of) many types of refractive 10 sensors (section 4). Finally in section 5 an epilogue is presented. 

Principles applied in refractive 10 sensors can be divided in two categories ... 

The microresonator therefore can also be used as a sensitive absorption sensor. In both set-ups as refractive or absorption sensor, the ultimate sensitivity is determined by the slope of the resonance peak, which is related to the resonator losses. 

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