Real-time optical fibre near-infrared chromatic dispersion analyser using collocated optical fibre gratings.

We present what we believe to be a novel optical fibre device for real-time measurements of near-infrared chromatic dispersion of a liquid medium from 1100 nm to 1700 nm. This inline optical fibre chromatic dispersion analyser is based upon collocated fibre long-period gratings written adjacently in the core by femtosecond laser inscription yielding 8 attenuation bands associated with different cladding modes, yielding 8 independent measurements. This fibre device is tested on a series of chemical compounds associated with wines. The results for each compound yielded distinctive chromatic responses. A machine learning pipeline was developed that successfully clustered and classified spectral responses of the different chemicals to illustrate the distinctive responses. The limits of detection for these fibre devices ranged from 1×10 to 6×10 mol/L for the compounds associated with wines, demonstrating the potential usefulness of an optical fibre chromatic dispersion analyser is capable of monitoring in real-time effective chromatic dispersion that is not offered by any current technology.