UV-Curable Polymer Microhemisphere-Based Fiber-Optic Fabry–Perot Interferometer for Simultaneous Measurement of Refractive Index and Temperature

A fiber-optic Fabry-Perot interferometer based on UV-curable polymer microhemisphere is proposed and demonstrated. The polymer microhemisphere is formed by adhering and solidifying a liquid microdroplet of UV-curable adhesive to the end face of a cleaved single-mode fiber. The height of polymer microhemisphere could be flexibly controlled by adjusting the diameter of a single-mode fiber. The theoretical and experimental results demonstrate that the refractive index (RI) and the temperature of external environment can be simultaneously measured by the fringe contrast variation and the wavelength shift of reflection spectra separately, alleviating the cross sensitivity effectively. The obtained temperature and RI sensitivities are about 0.19 nm/°C and 260 dB/RIU in the RI range of 1.38-1.42.