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Integrating nanowires into microstructured fibers represent a promising pathway to include sophisticated functionalities into optical fibers which allowing to develop novel types of photonic devices with unprecedented properties. Beside solid materials such as plasmonic metals or soft glasses particular interesting is the combination of liquids and fibers, which allows to access new regimes for fiber optics.
The first part of my presentation is related to ultrafast nonlinear light generation inside liquid core optical fibers. I will discusses our recent results on a new kind of optical soliton inside carbon-disulphide (CS2) filled liquid core fibers, which results from the hybrid nonlinear response functions of inorganic liquids, consisting of both instantaneous and noninstantaneous contributions. Using this fiber system we have measured octave-spanning mid-IR supercontinuum generation ranging from 1.1 µm towards more than 2.8 µm, showing clear indications of an improved shot-to-shot correlation, i.e., higher degree of coherence across the entire generated bandwidth at soliton numbers solely instantaneous systems deliver highly incoherent spectra, i.e., are modulatin instability driven. I will also discuss the unique temperature tuning potential of liquid core fibers, allowing to shift the central wavelength of dispersive waves by more than 100nm by locally changing the temperature within an interval of 20°C only.
In the second part of the talk I will present our recent results on tracking single individual nanoobjects inside optofluidic optical fibers via elastic light scattering. The nanoobjects are located within an aqueous environment inside a well-selected channel of the microstructured optical fiber used. Light from the core mode which hits the freely diffusing nanoobject scatters off and can be detected transversely. Tracking of unlabeled dielectric particles as small as 20 nm as well as individual cowpea chlorotic mottle virus (CCMV) virions at rates of over 2 kHz for durations of tens of seconds has been achieved in nanobore optical fibers, whereas full 3D information about the nanoobject’s trajectory are retrieved in modified step index fibers. From the light scattering intensities and the diffusion constants we were able to determine key properties of the particles such as size or hydrodynamic radius.
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