Structured-light-driven high-sensitivity optical refractive index sensing using the airy-vortex beam excitation

Publications

Structured-light-driven high-sensitivity optical refractive index sensing using the airy-vortex beam excitation

Year : 2026

Publisher : Elsevier B.V.

Source Title : Results in Engineering

Document Type :

Abstract

Recent advancements in the spatiotemporal engineering of electromagnetic wavefronts have redefined contemporary beam-shaping paradigms, solidifying their role as foundational elements in emergent photonic architectures and precipitating breakthroughs in nanoscale optical physics, hypersensitive metrology, computational imaging, optical sensing, and terabit-scale optical communications. Building upon this technological inflection point, the present investigation delineates a meticulously architected fiber-optic refractometric platform predicated on Airy-vortex beam excitation as distinguished by its intrinsic orbital angular momentum and transversely self-accelerating intensity profile. The principal novelty of the proposed sensing scheme resides in harnessing an Airy-vortex beam, whose unique spatial topology affords highly efficient and selective excitation of higher-order modes within a decladded multimode fiber, thereby augmenting evanescent-field confinement at the fiber-medium boundary. Furthermore, our study was supported by full-vector Beam propagation method (BPM) simulations in OptiBPM (v13.1.3), enabling detailed examination of Airy-vortex beam dynamics across the sensor geometry. The comprehensive beam propagation analysis establishes a peak sensitivity of 2808.49 dB/RIU with the refractive index resolution as fine as 3.56 × 10⁻⁶ RIU, surpassing the Gaussian-mode analogues by a conspicuous margin. Thus, this unique blend of diffraction resilience and structured phase topology inherent to the Airy-vortex beam renders this architecture a compelling platform for high-resolution, real-time refractometric sensing across various chemical, environmental, and biomedical regimes.