Room-Temperature Fiber Tip Nanoscale Optomechanical Bolometer
Shen Liu, Yanping Chen, Huailei Lai, Mengqiang Zou, Hang Xiao, Peijing Chen, Bin Du, Xunzhou Xiao, Jun He, Yiping Wang
Abstract
Nanomechanical bolometers have proven to be well suited to the analysis of light. However, conventional wafer-based devices have limited practical applications because they require special vacuum chambers, cryogenic temperatures, bulky space optical components, and/or complex circuitry. The present work developed a nanoscale optomechanical bolometer intended for photothermal sensing using an all-optical actuation and measurement approach. The proposed bolometer is compact and has an integrated all-optical-fiber structure based on fabricating a Fabry–Perot interferometer incorporating multilayer graphene at the fiber tip and packaged in a small vacuum-sealed tube. This microscale vacuum packaging doubled the signal-to-noise ratio compared with that in air. This miniature all-fiber nanoscale optomechanical bolometer also exhibited a high resolution with photothermal sensitivities of approximately 6.23 and 6.44 kHz/μW when using the second-order mode at room temperature and 0 °C, respectively. This design could be beneficial for applications outside specialized laboratories with uses in the fields of medicine, industrial manufacturing, nanoscience, and astronomy.