Review on optical fiber sensors with sensitive thin films

The combination of fiber optics with nano-structure technologies and sensitive thin films offers great potential for the realization of novel sensor concepts. Miniatured optical fiber sensors with thin films as sensitive elements could open new fields for optical fiber sensor applications. Thin films work as sensitive elements and transducer to get response and feedback from environments, in which optical fibers are employed to work as signal carrier. This article presents some research work conducted at the National Engineering Laboratory for Optical Fiber Sensing Technologies in recent years. Concrete examples are: Pd/WO3 co-sputtered coating as sensing material for optical hydrogen sensors shows robust mechanical stability and meanwhile good sensing performance; TbDyFe magnetostrictive coating directly deposited on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) demonstrates its possibility of miniature optical magnetic field/current sensors, and 40-pm shift of the FBG wavelength happens at a magnetic field order of 50 mT.