posted on 2023-09-27, 15:04authored byXingda Song, Qi Wang, Qiulan Liu, Longteng Yu, Shipeng Wang, Ni Yao, Limin Tong, Lei Zhang
The detection of subtle temperature variation plays an
important
role in many applications, including proximity sensing in robotics,
temperature measurements in microfluidics, and tumor monitoring in
healthcare. Herein, a flexible miniaturized optical temperature sensor
is fabricated by embedding twisted micro/nanofibers in a thin layer
of polydimethylsiloxane. Enabled by the dramatic change of the coupling
ratio under subtle temperature variation, the sensor exhibits an ultrahigh
sensitivity (−30 nm/°C) and high resolution (0.0012 °C).
As a proof-of-concept demonstration, a robotic arm equipped with our
sensor can avoid undesired collisions by detecting the subtle temperature
variation caused by the existence of a human. Moreover, benefiting
from the miniaturized and engineerable sensing structure, real-time
measurement of subtle temperature variation in microfluidic chips
is realized. These initial results pave the way toward a category
of optical sensing devices ranging from robotic skin to human–machine
interfaces and implantable healthcare sensors.