3D Printed Flow-Cells for Brillouin-based Tapered Optical Fiber Biosensors

This paper presents the design and realization of a 3D printed flow-cell for biosensing applications. The sensing mechanism is based on the change in the Brillouin frequency shift (BFS) along a tapered single-mode silica fiber, when the latter is subjected to refractive index changes of the outer medium. The proposed platform takes advantage of the spatial discrimination capabilities offered by the Brillouin sensing technology, so that different portions of the taper can be separately functionalized and employed for multi-parameter biosensing.