IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 29, NO.
9, MAY 1, 2017
Wide Range Refractive Index Measurement Using
a Multi-Angle Tilted Fiber Bragg Grating
Xiaoyong Chen, Jian Xu, Xuejun Zhang, Tuan Guo, and Bai-Ou Guan
Abstract— The conventional single-angle tilted fiber Bragg
grating (TFBG) can only excite a certain range of cladding modes,
limiting it for refractive index (RI) measurement in a wide range.
In this letter, we fabricate and demonstrate a multi-angle TFBG,
in which five individual TFBGs with tilt angles ranging from 5°
to 25° are sequentially inscribed along the core of a single mode
fiber within a length of 20 mm. The multi-angle TFBG excites
a continuous spectral comb of narrowband-cladding modes over
a much wider wavelength range (>170 nm) than a single-angle
TFBG, making it suitable for dynamic RI measurement over
a wide range (1.15–1.45). We have experimentally measured
aqueous solutions with RI ranging from 1.30 to 1.45 using the
uncoated (by monitoring the cut-off mode) and gold-coated (by
monitoring the surface Plasmon resonance) multi-angle TFBGs,
and both methods show linear responses, with RI sensitivities
about 500 nm/RIU.
Index Terms— Fiber Bragg gratings, fiber optics sensors.
I. I NTRODUCTION
T HE tilted fiber Bragg grating (TFBG), in which a peri-
odic and permanent refractive index (RI) modulation is
inscribed in the fiber core and the grating’s planes are written
with a non-zero tilt angle relative to the propagation axis of the
fiber, is one kind of fiber-optic sensor that not only possesses
all the advantages of well-established Bragg grating technol-
ogy, but also enables efficient resonant excitation of cladding
modes [1]–[3]. In the past decade, the TFBG has been widely
studied, including the in-fiber polarizer [4], vector rotator [5],
bending sensor [6], inclinometer [7], refractometer [8]–[10]
and biosensor [11]. Coating a TFBG with metal can enhance
its applications through the excitation of surface plasmon res-
onances [12]–[14]. TFBGs benefit from two unique features:
the stable structure, in which the light can be transferred from
the fiber core into the cladding without damaging the physical
structure of the optical fiber, and the resulting high-density
comb of narrowband spectral resonances, which can be easily
Manuscript received January 5, 2017; revised February 28, 2017; accepted
March 10, 2017. Date of publication March 17, 2017; date of cur-
rent version April 13, 2017. This work was supported in part by the
National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 61235005, in
part by the Guangdong Youth Science and Technology Innovation Talents
of China under Grant 2014TQ01X539, in part by the Guangdong Nat-
ural Science Foundation of China under Grant 2014A030313387, in part
the Guangzhou Key Collaborative Innovation Foundation of China under
Grant 2016201604030084, and in part by the Post-Doctoral Science
Foundation under Grant 2016M592600. (Corresponding author: Tuan Guo.)
The authors are with the Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Optical
Fiber Sensing and Communications, Institute of Photonics Technology, Jinan
University, Guangzhou 510632, China (e-mail: tuanguo@jnu.edu.cn).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this letter are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/LPT.2017.2682183
1041-1135 © 2017 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
719
observed in the transmission spectrum. The spectral shifts of
the individual resonances can be used to measure the changes
in the immediate vicinity of the cladding, making the TFBG
an ideal component for use as a refractometer. In addition,
as the core mode propagating in the fiber core is insensitive
to the surrounding refractive index (SRI) but sensitive to
the temperature, it can be used to calibrate the temperature-
induced spectral shift (which is ∼10 pm/°C [1]), eliminating
the temperature-induced cross sensitivity in RI measurement
and thereby improving its stability and reliability.
Selection of the tilt angle in the TFBG determines which
orders of cladding modes are excited [2]. In other words,
the effective indices and wavelength range of the excited
cladding modes are determined by the tilt angle of gratings,
so that the measurable SRI range changes according to the tilt
angle. Prior work demonstrated SRI measurement ranges and
their corresponding TFBG tilt angles of 1.38–1.43 (4°) [15],
1.34–1.42 (7°) [8], 1.32–1.42 (16°) [16] and 1.25–1.37
(20°) [17]. Hence, it is clear that a TFBG with a fixed
tilt angle can only be used for RI measurement within a
certain concerned range. To monitor different refractive indices
within a much broad range, TFBGs with different tilted
angles are required, resulting in increase of implementation
difficulty.
To improve the dynamic range of RI measurement, in par-
ticular for plasmonic applications, Baiad et al. proposed an in-
line multichannel plasmonic TFBG sensor that is constructed
by the concatenation of three TFBGs with tilt angles of 4°,
4.5° and 6° [18]. Although the measured RI ranges from 1.40
to 1.44, such design not only increases the cost and the imple-
mentation difficulty, but also increases the sensor length (9 cm)
in comparison to the conventional TFBG (1–2 cm), limiting it
used as a miniature component. Furthermore, it is hard to be
used for biosensing since the refractive indices of bio-solutions
are close to 1.33.
In this letter, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a
multi-angle TFBG, in which five tilt angles of 5°, 10° , 15°,
20° and 25° are sequentially inscribed in the fiber within a
2 cm length. We obtained a relatively smooth comb spectrum
of cladding modes as wide as 170 nm, and experimental results
we obtained from both uncoated and gold-coated plasmonic
multi-angle TFBGs demonstrate a very wide RI response
range. In addition, our multi-angle TFBG can be further
miniaturized through depositing a reflection mirror in the
transmission downstream, thus forming a fiber-tip sensor [8]
and making it possible to employ the sensor in hard-to-reach
places, even in vivo.
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Fig. 1. (a) Tilted grating inscription method for the proposed multi-angle
TFBG and (b) configuration of grating distribution in fiber core.
II. FABRICATION OF THE M ULTI -A NGLE TFBG
The multi-angle TFBG was manufactured using a scanned
phase-mask technique in a commercial single-mode fiber [2],
as shown in Fig. 1 (a). The fabrication process includes three
main steps. First we hydrogen loaded the fiber at temperature
of 50 °C, at a pressure of 1500 psi for 168 h, to increase
the photosensitivity of the fiber core. Then we cylindrically
focused a 193 nm pulsed ultraviolet (UV) light, with power
of 3 mJ per pulse and frequency of 200 Hz, through the ±1
diffraction order phase-mask and onto the fiber. We spatially
scanned the beam over the fiber region. Finally, by varying the
incidence angle of the beam on the mask + fiber assembly,
we inscribed a set of concatenated gratings at the desired tilt
angles into the fiber core within a very short length.
The tilt angle and the grating length are the two impor-
tant parameters as the selectively-excited cladding modes are
determined by both of them. The resonant wavelength λr and
the power reflectivity R can be expressed as follows [1]:
 
λr = Necore
ff (λr ) + Ne
r
f f (λr ) · / cos(θ ) (1)
R = tanh2 (κ L) (2)
where  is the period of the interference pattern that is
used to create the grating; θ is the tilt angle of the grat-
ing planes relative to the plane of the fiber cross section;
f f (λr ) is the effective index of the single mode guided
Necore
by the core at the wavelength λr where the resonance is
observed, and Ner f f (λr ) is the effective index of cladding
mode r at the same wavelength, κ is the coupling coefficient
between the incident core mode and the cladding mode that
is phase matched, and L is the grating length. According to
Eq. (1) the excited cladding modes are determined by the
tilt angle, signifying that the operating range of the TFBG
can be adjusted through the inscribed tilt angle. Moreover,
Eq. (2) shows that the strength of the grating resonances
depends on the coupling coefficient κ and on the grating
length L. Therefore, the transmission spectrum can be opti-
mized by carefully adjusting the grating length. In our design,
the multi-angle TFBG consists of concatenated individual
TFBGs with tilt angles of 5°, 10°, 15°, 20° and 25° and
grating lengths of 1.0, 2.1, 3.9, 5.0 and 8.0 mm, respectively,
IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 29, NO. 9, MAY 1, 2017
Fig. 2. Transmission spectra of the proposed multi-angle TFBG (upper,
red line) and the conventional single-angle TFBGs (lower) with only one tilt
angle of 5° (black line), 10° (yellow line), 15° (blue line), 20° (green line) and
25° (pink line).
as shown in Fig. 1 (b). With this multi-angle TFBG, we
obtained a wide spectrum, relatively smooth comb of cladding
modes.
III. M ULTI -A NGLE TFBG C HARACTERISTICS
Figure 2 shows the experimentally measured transmission
spectrum of the multi-angle TFBG in the air, in comparison
to the conventional TFBGs with only one tilt angle of 5°, 10°,
15°, 20° and 25°. As can be seen, a relatively wide spectrum
of transmission resonances from 1382 to 1554 nm is created
by the multi-angle TFBG, including a well-defined comb of
cladding modes (1382–1552 nm). This comb range is much
wider than that obtained using a conventional TFBG which has
only one grating of tilt angle, i.e. the comb range of a 20 mm
long 5° TFBG is 1530 to 1552 nm. Therefore, we can see that
the comb range of our multi-angle TFBG covers all the comb
ranges of the five separate TFBGs, each with a fixed tilt angle.
The length of the fabricated multi-angle TFBG was 20 mm
(1.0 + 2.1 + 3.9 + 5.0 + 8.0 mm), whereas in Fig. 2 the
length of each single-angle TFBG was also 20 mm. It should
be pointed out here that the cladding resonance combs for
different TFBGs in Fig. 2 (bottom) do not overlap with each
other. This is mainly because the five single-angle TFBGs are
inscribed individually. This makes them suffer from different
axial strains when they are clamped by the fiber fixtures
during the grating inscription, thus leading to slightly different
wavelength shifts at random. This problem does not exist
for the case of multi-angle TFBG inscription in Fig. 2 (top).
Because we do not need to remove the fiber or reload it in
the fiber clamper during the grating inscription. Hence, the
fiber maintains the same axial strain and the cladding modes
excited by the five separate TFBGs overlap quite well and
resulting in a clean spectral comb. Additionally, it should be
pointed out that the tilted angle only determines the excitation
of the cladding modes but not affects the grating period, as it
is determined by the phase-mask.
IV. R EFRACTIVE I NDEX S ENSING U SING
M ULTI -A NGLE TFBG
To experimentally demonstrate our multi-angle TFBG, we
launched light from a broadband source into the multi-angle
TFBG. The polarization state of the launched light was
CHEN et al.: WIDE RANGE REFRACTIVE INDEX MEASUREMENT USING A MULTI-ANGLE TFBG
Fig. 3. Measured transmission spectra of the multi-angle TFBG immersed
in the index-matching liquid with RI from 1.30 to 1.45: (a) uncoated and
(b) gold-coated multi-angle TFBGs. Note that the asterisk symbols “∗” in
(a) represent the cladding mode cutoff and the red vertical arrow symbols
“↓” in (b) show the positions of the surface Plasmon resonances.
controlled by a linear polarizer followed by a polarization
controller. The transmission spectra were observed using an
optical spectrum analyzer with a resolution of 0.02 nm.
During SRI measurements, the multi-angle TFBG was entirely
immersed in index-matching liquid with precisely known RI.
A. Uncoated multi-angle TFBG for SRI measurement
Figure 3 (a) shows the measured spectra using the uncoated
multi-angle TFBG in index-matching liquid with a range of
refractive indices from 1.300 to 1.456. Compared to the trans-
mission spectrum obtained in the air (red line in Fig. 2), we
see that, although a large range of cladding modes is excited
when the sensor is surrounded by air, the cladding modes on
the short wavelength side are suppressed when the sensor
is immersed in the liquid. This is because the suppressed
cladding modes are those whose high-order modes that have
effective indices close to or lower than the SRI of the liquid, so
that total internal reflection no longer occurs at the interface
between the fiber cladding and the surrounding liquid. The
cut-off mode, indicated by red asterisk symbols in Fig. 3 (a),
is the one usually used for SRI measurement because of its
high sensitivity compared to other excited cladding modes, and
it shifts monotonically towards longer wavelengths as the SRI
of the liquid increases. Measured cut-off mode wavelength as
a function of SRI is presented in Fig. 4 (a). Linear regression
analysis shows that the relationship between cutoff wavelength
and SRI is highly linear (regression coefficient = 99.975 %
721
Fig. 4. Wavelength response of cutoff mode (a) and SPR (b) versus SRI in
the cases of uncoated and gold-coated TFBG, respectively. The error bars are
based on quintuplet measurements.
with a sensitivity of 513.9 nm/refractive index unit (RIU).
Moreover, based on the wavelength range of the cladding
modes, we calculate that the lower limit of measurable RI
could be as low as 1.14. Therefore, the sensor is capable of
measuring SRI over the wide range from 1.14 to 1.45. Note
that the TFBG sensor proposed here could also continuously
measure small RI change: in this case, the cutoff mode will not
jump from one cladding mode to the adjacent one, but instead
by shifting the wavelength itself. The error bars obtained
in Fig. 4 is original from the small fluctuations of the whole
sensing system for repeating sample measurements.
B. Gold-coated multi-angle TFBG for SRI measurement
We converted the uncoated multi-angle TFBG to a surface
Plasmon resonance (SPR) SRI sensor by coating it with a gold
film. A 50-nm thick gold film was radio-frequency magnetron
sputtered onto the fiber over a 2 to 3 nm film of chromium.
The thin chromium film served to increase adhesion between
the gold and the fiber. Film uniformity was maintained by
rotating the fiber along its axis during the deposition process.
Figure 3 (b) shows the measured spectra in matching liquids
with RI ranging from 1.30 to 1.428. The SPR wavelength,
defined as the wavelength corresponding to the deepest point
in the SPR absorption area (as the red vertical arrow symbols
“↓” shown in Fig. 3 (b)), shifts towards the longer wavelengths
as the RI of the liquid increases. When the SRI is higher than
1.428, we can no longer observe any SPR modes.
The measurable SRI range of 1.300 to 1.428 got from the
experiment is significantly wider than that obtained using a
conventional TFBG with only one tilt angle. For example, the
measured SRI range of a 15° TFBG-SPR is 1.33–1.36 [19].
It is also much wider than the measured SRI
722
range (1.40–1,44) obtained in the reported concatenated
TFBGs [19]. Figure 4 (b) shows a linear fit to the measured
results. Linear regression analysis shows that the relationship
between SPR wavelength and SRI is highly linear (regression
coefficient = 99.927 % with a sensitivity of 505.43 nm/RIU).
Similar to the uncoated multi-angle TFBG, the gold-coated
plasmonic multi-angle TFBG can perform well over measured
range. It can be theoretically calculated, according to the
experimental results, that the measured RI limitation can be
extended to 1.15, meaning that the theoretical RI response
range can be as wide as 0.278 (1.15 – 1.428). In general,
the SPR and uncoated fiber methods essentially provide the
similar level of RI sensitivity (about 500∼550 nm/RIU) by
wavelength interrogation. However, as the SPR attenuation
profile (Fig. 3(b)) is much broader (more than 10 nm in
bandwidth), it is hard to precisely locate its central wavelength.
That is why we prefer to using the narrow cladding modes
whose wavelength match to SPR for interrogation. In this
case, we monitor the intensity modulation of the selected
cladding mode to replace the wavelength monitoring.
A beneficial feature of the multi-angle TFBG sensor,
whether uncoated or metalized, is the presence of the core
Bragg resonance, whose wavelength and strength are both
unaffected by the external medium. As already mentioned,
the core Bragg resonance can be advantageously used to
independently measure temperature as well as power level
fluctuation effects from the sensor response. In addition, we
should point out here that the RI response curve is strongly
dependent on the initial TFBG transmission spectrum, and
strong cladding mode resonances that becomes cut off in
media with RI as low as 1.0, i.e. air, can be achieved as the
tilt angle further increases [20]. Hence, our multi-angle TFBG
structure potentially possesses continuous RI measurable range
from 1.00 to 1.45 by inscribing tilted gratings with large
angles (>25° ) in the fiber, covering gaseous and biochemical
detections.
V. C ONCLUSION
We have proposed, fabricated and demonstrated a multi-
angle TFBG refractive index sensor capable of measuring
surrounding refractive index from 1.30 to 1.45, and potentially
as low as 1.14. The sensor consists of five concatenated
gratings with tilt angles of 5°, 10°, 15°, 20° and 25°, which
were sequentially inscribed in a single mode fiber. Surround-
ing refractive index is measured by the effect it has on
the rich spectrum of backward-propagating cladding modes.
The sensor has demonstrated linear response (>99%) to SRI
in both measurable methods: uncoated (by monitoring the
cutoff mode wavelength) and gold-coated (by monitoring the
SPR wavelength) multi-angle TFBGs, with sensitivities over
500 nm/RIU.
IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS, VOL. 29, NO. 9, MAY 1, 2017
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