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Ultra-Sensitive Optical Sensor Utilizing Airy-Vortex Structured Light for Detecting Milk Adulteration

Author : Dr Arijit Datta

Year : 2026

Publisher : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.

Source Title : Proceedings of 5th International Conference on Communication, Computing and Electronics Systems, ICCCES 2026

Document Type :

Abstract

Deliberate contamination of milk with inexpensive or unsafe additives has emerged as a pressing food safety challenge, reducing its nutritional integrity and posing notable risks to consumer health. This work presents a high-performance optical sensing approach employing an Airy-vortex (AV) beam launched into a decladded multimode fiber. This sensing mechanism is based on monitoring the transmission loss variations resulting from evanescent field absorption when the exposed fiber segment is immersed in milk samples adulterated with formaldehyde and hydrogen peroxide. Adulteration levels ranging from 0 % to 14.28 %, corresponding to refractive index(RI) values between 1.34550 and 1.34966, were analyzed to evaluate the sensor’s response. Further, the beam propagation characteristics and the sensing behavior were simulated using the OptiBPM (13.1.3) software, which validated the enhanced light-matter interaction achieved through AV excitation. For a sensing length of 6 cm, the proposed configuration achieved sensitivities of 0.1209 dB / % for formaldehyde and 0.1055 dB / % for hydrogen peroxide, offering a notable improvement compared to Gaussianbeam excitation. Thus, the results confirm that Airy-vortex structured light enables a compact, fabrication-friendly, and highly responsive platform for the detection of milk adulteration.