A kind of biconically-tapered optical fiber (BTOF) modified by silica nanospheres is proposed to implement detection of refractive index (RI), especially low RI, with strong nonlinearity and enhanced sensitivity; this idea arose from an interesting experiment with a BTOF whose surface was very rough. The mechanisms of the nonlinear characters are investigated and explained by the coupling effects of Mie scattering and multimode propagation, and this phenomenon is repeated in several experiments with different fibers. Measured sensitivity magnification of more than 100 from a 2.8-μ.m-thick and 14-mm-long BTOF after modification by 400-nm silica nanospheres is shown in this letter.
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Liu et al. (2012) studied this question.
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