Investigation of a pressure-dependent refractive index of germanium film with an optical fiber film sensor

Appl Opt. 2018 Feb 1;57(4):684-688. doi: 10.1364/AO.57.000684.

Abstract

The refractive index of Ge is found in decline with applied pressure at a specific wavelength in the absorption region below 1900 nm, where the absorption coefficient rises dramatically with decreased wavelength. In this paper, we use a Ge-coated fiber optic probe to demonstrate quantitatively that the downward trend in the refractive index to increasing pressure matches the theoretically simulated optical properties of Ge with a measurement error of 1.03×10-3 in the refractive index, which is further calculated within the framework of density functional theory with local density approximation. For the first time, to the best of our knowledge, both theoretical and experimental results prove that the refractive index reduces linearly with a gradient of -3.30×10-4/MPa as the pressure increases from 0 to 20 MPa.