Fabrication of a Low-Cost, Fiber-Coupled, and Air-Spaced Fabry-Pérot Etalon

In the scope of my PhD thesis at the Institute of Electrical Measurement and Sensor Systems, I'm working on evaluating the miniaturization potential of photothermal gas and aerosol sensors. A lot of effort is put into making photonic sensors either more robust and versatile or low-cost and miniaturized, but it's quite challenging to combine these goals with necessary selectivity and sensitivity. The main advantage of our protocol stems from the easy accessibility of the method.

Without having the need for a clean room or special machines, our protocol offers the chance for cost-effective prototyping with standard photonic equipment. We hope that our protocol enables researchers'fast and easy prototyping of multiple etalon configurations in a time and cost-effective way. We will continue working on miniaturizing photonic aerosol and gas sensors.

We will focus on new sensing principles by exploiting the interactions between structured light and structured matter.