Study On The Properties Of Silica Nano Wire Waveguides & Its Application In Sensing

Recently, a breakthrough has been made in the fabrication of the silica nano-wire waveguides. It has many special properties, such as low-loss, strong evanescent-field and so on. It can be used in sensor, photoelectric device and biology. The development of photoelectric device and biology will benefit from nano-technique. In this thesis, the properties of nano-wire waveguides and its application are studied.Firstly, current one-dimension nano-structure waveguides and the fabrication of the silica nano-wires are reviewed. By a flame-heated fiber drawing method, we obtained silica nano-wires. We theoretically analyze the optical properties of silica nano-wires, and study its evanescent-field. Later, the transportation characteristic of silica nano-wires is studied in experiment. Transmission loss of evanescent wave in nano-wires (10~2～10~3nm) is analyzed, when the diameter and ambient medium (refractive index) have been changed. In Mach-Zehnder fiber interferometer, nano-wires can be used as sensing-arm. A approach for measurement in interferometer—phase extraction, is introduced.In conclusion, with these advantages (such as low-loss, small dimension, strong evanescent- field and so on), nano-wire waveguides can be widely used in biology's detection, sensing and microphotonics. For this reason, the future about nano-wires in these fields is discussied in this thesis.