Elastic Optical Fiber Fabry–Perot Interferometer for Highly Sensitive AC Magnetic Field Measurement

Abstract

We have proposed and demonstrated a novel elastic optical fiber Fabry–Perot interferometer (FPI)-based ac magnetic field sensor with high magnetic sensitivity and correction of temperature crosstalk. The elastic FPI is formed by soft splicing using low Young’s modulus polydimethylsiloxane material at the joint point of a hollow-core fiber and single-mode fibers and is fixed on a common supermendur rod, a kind of magnetostrictive material. AC magnetic field-induced length change of the magnetostrictive rod results in the obvious change of the FPI cavity length and finally is transduced to the intensity variation of the sensor signal, which makes the sensor highly sensitive to ac magnetic field. Taking advantage of the elastic FPI structure, the magnetic sensitivity (in terms of strain) is improved to 48 ppm/mT (75.01 pm/mT in terms of wavelength), compared with the low intrinsic sensitivity of the conventional magnetostrictive rod (usually below several ppm/mT and 0.39 ppm/mT in our case). Moreover, the impact of temperature cross-sensitivity is removed by retrieving the wavelength shift of the FPI interference spectrum based on the calibrated signal voltage versus wavelength shift. All the ac magnetic fields of different frequencies and intensities have been successfully detected and measured by our FPI sensor without the impact of temperature crosstalk. We believe such a simple, compact, and cost-effective sensor would be a promising candidate for accurate monitoring of ac magnetic field.