Affiliation: | aLPCI, Ecole Centrale de Lyon, 36 avenue Guy de Collongue, 69131 Ecully, France bTSI, Université J. Monnet, 23 rue du Dr P. Michelon, 42023 Saint-Etienne, France |
Abstract: | Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) is a powerful technique for direct sensitive (bio) chemical detection. This phenomenon can be used to measure the refractive index of either bulk chemical samples or chemically sensing thin layers. In this work, a SPR fibre optic sensor has been developed. A 50 nm thick silver film is deposited by thermal evaporation onto the silica core of the optical fibre. To protect silver from oxidation, the evaporated silver film was covered with self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) of long-chain alkanethiols (1-octadecanethiol). To characterize these SAMs, silver films evaporated onto macroscopic glass surfaces as test samples and several techniques such as contact angle measurements (sessile drop method), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and atomic force microscopy (AFM) were used. In the subsequent step, a chemically sensing thin layer (polyfluorosiloxane) was deposited onto the thiol surface. In such a configuration the SPR fibre optic sensor was able to detect a few percent of chloro-fluoro-carbon (CFC) vapours. |