Optical fiber setups can often be very complicated and hard to be moved from laboratory to real life applications because of bulk measuring equipments or brittle optical fiber configuration.

From the point of view of the fiber coupled light source equipment Pyroistech offers robust and compact solutions that cover the entire spectrum from ultraviolet to visible and near infrared regions. However, optical fiber transduction mechanisms are sometimes based in a transmission configuration, which limits the application of the sensing probe in harsh, reduced or not easily accessible environments due to the fact that the sensing element must be connected at both ends.

Optical fiber end facet mirroring can help to obtain an analogous optical fiber reflection configuration (see the figure below) but it can be tedious or require complex equipments, such as vacuum thermal evaporation or sputtering machine. A more convenient approach is based on the well-known Tollen’s reaction (see additional information below) that permits to obtain a mirrored end face (90-95% reflectance) in a simple and fast manner.

The utilization of optical fiber reflection based configurations is generally more appropriated for sensing applications as dip probes suitable for low volume sensing in chemical and biological applications.

For more information: Saito, Y., Wang, J.J., Smith, D.A., Batchelder, D.N., “A simple chemical method for the preparation of silver surfaces for efficient SERS,” Langmuir, vol. 18(8), pp. 2959-2961, 2002

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