Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

The principal research objective of this program is to continue fundamental studies of novel fiber-optic sensing devices based on the lab-on-a-fiber (LOF) concept, which could be used in safety and security or environmental monitoring as remote detectors of dangerous substances. These devices will be based on photonic crystal fibers (PCFs), on standard fibers and on a variety of functionalized coatings, and will be used for applications in photonic sensing of heavy metals and bacteria. The research plan includes specific short-term and long-term objectives. At the sensing device level, studies and development of a next generation of fiber-optic sensors based on standard fibers and on PCFs will be undertaken to develop an entirely new class of devices with programmable properties. These devices will be specifically designed using a variety of approaches, involving evanescent wave probes and long-period gratings, in combination with few-mode and multimode interferometry. A practical objective is to selectively design and optimize the transmission, polarization, and light collection properties of these devices through appropriate microstructural modeling, and then to fabricate them through appropriate technological processes. A second objective is to subsequently equip these devices with a variety of functionalized coatings, in order to induce effects allowing for detection of selected targets. For the detection of heavy metal ions in water, fluorescent turn-on molecular probes will be used, while for cyanobacteria presence detection in water we plan to use biophages; both types of sensory materials will be integrated with the optical fibers. Consequently, we expect to design and manufacture fiber sensors with superior metrological properties, including selectively enhanced sensitivity to a chosen target and negligible false positive ratio. Due to the flexible properties of the new sensors and the processing functionality of our LOF system approach they will be compatible with many specific sensor configurations.