Microfiber interferometric acoustic transducers

Acoustic and ultrasonic transducers are key components in biomedical information technology, which has been applied in medical diagnosis, photoacoustic endoscopy and photoacoustic imaging. In this paper, an acoustic transducer based on Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) fabricated in a microscaled optical fiber is demonstrated. The transducer is fabricated by forming two wavelength-matched Bragg gratings into the microfiber by means of side illumination with a 193nm excimer laser. When placing the transducer in water, the applied acoustic signal periodically changes the refractive index (RI) of the surrounding liquid and modulates the transmission of the FPI based on the evanescent-field interaction between the liquid and the transmitting light. As a result, the acoustic signal can be constructed with a tunable laser whose output wavelength is located at the slope of the inteferometric fringes. The transducer presents a sensitivity of 10 times higher than the counterparts fabricated in conventional singlemode fibers and has great potential to achieve higher resolution for photoacoustic imaging due to its reduced diameter.