Effects of TiO2 on the performance of silver coated on side-polished optical fiber for alcohol sensing applications

This work reports the experimental and numerical investigations on the effect of titanium oxide (TiO2) integrated on the optical fiber silver (Ag) surface plasmon resonance (SPR) sensors. In this paper, the numerical simulation is also analyzed using the finite element method (FEM) which shows good agreement. Results are compared with the experimental findings, focusing on the SPR phenomena for refractive index sensing using side-polished optical fiber, where the characteristics of the Ag layer with the integration of TiO2 are optimized. The essential parameters include the thickness of Ag namely 20 nm, 30 nm and 40 nm for optimization studies of SPR properties. TiO2 was then coated on the Ag thin layer to sense isopropanol at different concentration. It is shown…