▎ 摘　　要

An optical fiber based refractive index sensor using graphene oxide (GO) encapsulated silver nanoparticles (AgNPs) is reported. The AgNPs are encapsulated with a very thin layer of GO as it controls the inter-particle distance thereby preventing aggregation. The encapsulation also enhances the colloidal stability and prevents the oxidation of the AgNPs by separating them from direct contact with the aqueous medium. High-resolution transmission electron microscopy results support the formation of 1 nm thick GO around AgNPs of an average size of 35 nm. A Raman spectrometer and a UV-VIS spectrometer have been used to characterize and study the synthesized nanoparticles along with GO. Further, Raman spectra support a 64.72% increase in D-peak intensity and a 52.91% increase in G-peak intensity of the GO-encapsulated AgNPs (GOE-AgNPs) with respect to GO. Further, the GOE-AgNPs are immobilized on the core of functionalized plastic-cladded silica fiber. FESEM confirms the immobilization of the GOE-AgNPs on the fiber core. We observed that the peak absorbance changes by 87.55% with a 0.05 change in the refractive index. The sensitivity of the proposed fiber sensor is found to be 0.9406 Delta A/RIU along with a resolution of 12.8 x 10(-4) RIU. MATLAB is used to calculate the absorbance of the AgNPs by considering the bound and free electron contribution along with the size-dependent dispersion of the nanoparticles. We found that the simulation results are in good agreement with the experimental results.