Hollow-core photonic crystal fiber probe for remote fluorescence sensing with single molecule sensitivity

Current optical fiber probes for fluorescence spectroscopy struggle with large luminescence background and low detection sensitivities that challenge the detection of fluorescent molecules at sub-micromolar concentration. Here we report the demonstration of a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF) probe for remote fluorescence sensing with single molecule sensitivity down to nanomolar concentrations, where both the excitation and fluorescence beams are counter-propagating through the same fiber. A 20 μm polystyrene microsphere is used to efficiently excite and collect the fluorescence from the sample solution thanks to a photonic nanojet effect. Compared to earlier work with silica fibers, the new HC-PCF-microsphere probe achieves a 200x improvement of the signal-to-noise ratio for a single molecule detection event, and a 1000x reduction of the minimum detectable concentration. The device is implemented with fluorescence correlation spectroscopy to distinguish between molecules of similar fluorescence spectra based on the analysis of their translational diffusion properties, and provides similar performance as conventional confocal microscopes.