Fiber gas sensing techniques have been applied for a wide range of industrial applications. In this paper, the basic fiber gas sensing principles and the development of different fibers have been introduced. In various specialty fibers, hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HC-PCFs) can overcome the fundamental limits of solid fibers and have attracted intense interest recently. Here, we focus on the review of HC-PCF gas sensing, including the light-guiding mechanisms of HC-PCFs, various sensing configurations, microfabrication approaches, and recent research advances including the mid-infrared gas sensors via hollow core anti-resonant fibers. This review gives a detailed and deep understanding of HC-PCF gas sensors and will promote more practical applications of HC-PCFs in the near future.

We have proposed and fabricated dual self-growing polymer microtips, acting as parallel Fabry-Perot interferometers (FPIs), at the end-facet of a multicore fiber (MCF). With the significantly different responses of these two FPIs, a highly discriminative sensing of humidity and temperature has been demonstrated. The achieved condition number of 3.98 is the lowest in the reported discriminative fiber optic sensors for humidity and temperature, indicating the high reliability when implementing the discriminative measurement. In addition, the low relative-measurement errors of less than 0.49% for the humidity and 1.64% for the temperature have been experimentally verified. The two densely-integrated microtips, with the radial distance less than 40 m, can notably improve the spatial measurement accuracy, and the signals of MCF-tip FPIs can be effectively collected by the fan-in and fan-out device. The proposed sensing microtips at the top of MCF provide a compact, flexible, and scalable scheme for sensitive discriminative measurements, which may pave the way towards micro-scale integrated fiber optic devices for multi-parameters sensing, and accelerate various MCF applications.

Multicore fibers (MCFs) have attracted intense attention to overcome the capacity limit of single-core optical fiber communication system. However, as indispensable connection devices between the MCF and the individual single mode fiber (SMF), fan-in and fan-out (FIFO) devices are challenging to achieve overall performance in terms of coupling efficiency, crosstalk, return loss, and device compactness. Here we develop an MCF reverse-tapering technique to increase the core-to-core spacing of the MCF and construct a spacing-tailored interface between the MCF and the normal SMF bundle. The fabricated FIFO device for the small-core MCF with narrow core-to-core spacing of 35 μm features a low average coupling loss (∼0.6 dB), extraordinarily low crosstalk (<−65 dB) and a return loss (<−60 dB) without using any bridge elements, where the remarkably low crosstalk is about 20 dB lower than using special bridge fibers for the same type of MCF. The flexibility of reverse tapering of MCFs can overcome its intrinsic integration challenge and provide a powerful approach to constructing all-fiber FIFO devices with compact construction and excellent overall performance.

An optimized multi-step index (MSI) 2-LP-mode fiber is proposed and fabricated with low propagation loss of 0.179 dB/km, low intermodal crosstalk and excellent bend resistance. We experimentally clarified the characteristics of backward Brillouin scattering (BBS) and forward Brillouin scattering (FBS) induced by radial acoustic modes (R_0,m) in the fabricated MSI 2-LP-mode fiber, respectively. Via the use of this two-mode fiber, we demonstrated a novel discriminative measurement method of temperature and acoustic impedance based on BBS and FBS, achieving improved experimental measurement uncertainties of 0.2 °C and 0.019 kg/(s·mm²) for optoacoustic chemical sensing. The low propagation loss of the sensing fiber and the new measurement method based on both BBS and FBS may pave the way for long-distance and high spatial resolution distributed fiber sensors.

Interest grows in designing silicon-on-insulator slot waveguides to trap optical fields in subwavelength-scale slots and developing their optofluidic devices. However, it is worth noting that the inherent limitations of the waveguide structures may result in high optical losses and short optical paths, which challenge the device performance in optofluidics. Incorporating the planar silicon-based slot waveguide concept into a silica-based hollow-core fiber can provide a perfect solution to realize an efficient optofluidic waveguide. Here we propose a subwavelength-scale liquid-core hybrid fiber (LCHF), where the core is filled with carbon disulfide and surrounded by a silicon ring in a silica background. The waveguide properties and the Stimulated Raman Scattering (SRS) effect in the LCHF are investigated. The fraction of power inside the core of 56.3% allows an improved sensitivity in optical sensing; while the modal Raman gain of 23.60 m-1·W-1 is 2 times larger than that generated around a nano fiber with the interaction between the evanescent optical field and the surrounding Raman media benzene-methanol, which enables a significant low-threshold SRS effect. Besides, this in-fiber structure features compactness, robustness, flexibility, ease of implementation in both trace sample consumption and reasonable liquid filling duration, as well as compatibility with optical fiber systems. The detailed analyses of the properties and utilizations of the LCHF suggest a promising in-fiber optofluidic platform, which provides a novel insight into optofluidic devices, optical sensing, nonlinear optics, etc.