The ability to sense heat and touch is essential for healthcare, robotics, and human–machine interfaces. By taking advantage of the engineerable waveguiding properties, we design and fabricate a flexible optical microfiber sensor for simultaneous temperature and pressure measurement based on theoretical calculation. The sensor exhibits a high temperature sensitivity of 1.2 nm/°C by measuring the shift of a high-order mode cutoff wavelength in the short-wavelength range. In the case of pressure sensing, the sensor shows a sensitivity of 4.5% per kilopascal with a fast temporal frequency response of 1000 Hz owing to the strong evanescent wave guided outside the microfiber. The cross talk is negligible because the temperature and pressure signals are measured at different wavelengths based on different mechanisms. The properties of fast temporal response, high temperature, and pressure sensitivity enable the sensor for real-time skin temperature and wrist pulse measurements, which is critical to the accurate analysis of pulse waveforms. We believe the sensor will have great potential in wearable optical devices ranging from healthcare to humanoid robots.

We theoretically investigate dark dimer mode excitation and strong coupling with a nanorod dipole. Efficient excitation of a dark mode in a gold (Au) nanorod dimer using an electric dipole can be achieved by an optimal overlap between the dipole moment and dark modal field. By replacing the dipole emitter with an Au nanorod, a plane wave excited dipole mode in the nanorod can be effectively coupled to the dark dimer mode through near-field interaction. At a 10-nm separation of the nanorod and the dimer, plasmonic interaction between dipole-dark modes enters the strong coupling regime with a Rabi-like splitting of 219.2 meV, which is further evidenced by the anticrossing feature and Rabi-like oscillation of electromagnetic energy of the coupled modes. Our results propose an efficient approach to far-field activating dark modes in coupled nanorod dimers and exchanging plasmonic excitations at nanoscale, which may open new opportunities for nanoplasmonic applications such as nanolasers or nanosensors.