Femtosecond laser micromachining of microfluidic fiber sensors

Migration of lab-on-chip configurations into the optical fiber platform opens the revolutionary prospect of lab-in-fiber systems on the basis of an efficient optical transport highway for multifunctional sensing. In this paper, three-dimensional microfluidic channels patterning inside the fiber by femtosecond laser ablation, femtosecond laser assisted splicing and selective chemical etching will be introduced in terms of machining mechanism and accuracy. In these approaches, we have successfully achieved phase-shifted FBG sensor based on in-grating bubble and several in-fiber cavity based interferometric sensors and also preliminarily explore their applications in biochemical analysis.