Electro-Optical Biosensor Based on Embedded Double-Monolayer of Graphene Capacitor in Polymer Technology.

In this work, we present an interferometric polymer-based electro-optical device, integrated with an embedded double-monolayer graphene capacitor for biosensing applications. An external voltage across the capacitor applies an electric field to the graphene layers modifying their surface charge density and the Fermi level position in these layers. This in turn changes the electro-optic properties of the graphene layers making absorption in the waveguide tunable with external voltages. Simultaneously, it is possible to appreciate that this phenomenon contributes to the maximization of the light-graphene interaction by evanescent wave in the sensing area. As a result, it is obtained large phase changes at the output of the interferometer, as a function of small variations in the refractive index in the cladding area, which significantly increasing the sensitivity of the device. The optimum interaction length obtained was 1.24 cm considering a cladding refractive index of 1.33. An absorption change of 129 dB/mm was demonstrated. This result combined with the photonic device based on polymer technology may enable a low-cost solution for biosensing applications in Point of Care (PoC) platform.

200-fs mode-locked Erbium-doped fiber laser by using mechanically exfoliated MoS2 saturable absorber onto D-shaped optical fiber.

For the first time, we demonstrated the fabrication of mechanically exfoliated molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) samples deposited onto a D-shaped optical fiber. The MoS2 exfoliated flakes were deposited onto a stacked of 1.2 µm PVA (polyvinyl alcohol) and 300 nm PMMA (polymethyl methacrylate) layers and then transferred directly onto a side polished surface of D-shaped optical fiber with polishing length of 17 mm and no distance from the fiber core. The sample exhibited a high polarization performance as a polarizer with relative polarization extinction ratio of 97.5%. By incorporating the sample as a saturable absorber in the Erbium-doped fiber laser (EDFL), bandwidth of 20.5 nm and pulse duration of 200 fs were generated, which corresponded to the best mode-locking results obtained for all-fiber MoS2 saturable absorber at 1.5 µm wavelength.