Fiber sensing with photorefractive fiber

Abstract

Optical fibers have been widely used for transmitting temporal signal. However, the transmission of spatial signal has not been fully exploited. Although multimode fiber has a large space-bandwidth product, transmitting spatial signals by using a fiber is rather difficult. When a laser beam is lached into a multimode fiber, the exit light field produces a complicated speckle pattern caused by the modal phasing of the fiber. It is difficult to recover the transmitted informati from the speckle field. However, the fiber speckle field can be used to fiber sensing with a hologrpahic method. In other words, if a hologram is made with the speckle fiber field, the information of the fiber status can be recovered. Thus by reading the hologram by the same speckle field, the reference beam can be reconstructed, which represents the detection of the speckle field. In other words, instead of exploiting the temporal content, the spatial content from a multimode fiber can be exploited for sensing. Our analyses and experimentations have shown that the fiber specklegram sensor (FSS) is highly senstiive to perturbation, and it is less vulnerable to the environment factors. Applications of the FSS to temperature, transversal displacement, and dynamic sensing are also included.