Optical fibres based on natural biological minerals — sea sponge spicules

A complex study of spicules of glass sponges Hyalonema sieboldi and Pheronema sp. is performed. It is shown that skeletal spicules represent a bundle of composite fibres cemented with silicon dioxide, which imparts a high mechanical strength to spicules. The presence of a layered organosilicon structure at the nanometre scale in the spicule cross section gives rise to a periodic spatial modulation of the permittivity of the spicule material, which allows one to treat spicules as one-dimensional photonic crystals. Upon excitation of basal spicules by second-harmonic pulses from a Nd:YAG laser, we observed a considerable increase in the fluorescence intensity in the long-wavelength region with a maximum at 770 nm, saturation and anomalously large fluorescence lifetimes.