Abstract

A Mach-Zehnder interferometer based on a twin-core fiber was proposed and experimentally demonstrated for gas pressure measurements. The in-line Mach-Zehnder interferometer was fabricated by splicing a short section of twin-core fiber between two single mode fibers. A micro-channel was created to form an interferometer arm by use of a femtosecond laser to drill through one core of the twin-core fiber. The other core of the fiber was remained as the reference arm. Such a Mach-Zehnder interferometer exhibited a high gas pressure sensitivity of -9.6 nm/MPa and a low temperature cross-sensitivity of 4.4 KPa/°C. Moreover, ultra-compact device size and all-fiber configuration make it very suitable for highly-sensitive gas pressure sensing in harsh environments.

Highlights

  • Fiber optic sensors have been demonstrated to extremely attractive for various areas of biomedicine, automotive industries and environmental monitoring [1,2,3,4,5,6]

  • We present a highly-sensitive pressure sensor based on a fiber in-line MZI, which is fabricated by using femtosecond laser (FS) micromachining and fusion splicing technique

  • I.e. fiber offset distance in splicing, will result in the decay of the fringe visibility that is harmful to sensing applications and a very short piece of twin-core fiber (TCF) (~200μm) was employed in this MZI to avoid the light coupling between the two cores and decrease the total insertion loss of this device

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Summary

Introduction

Fiber optic sensors have been demonstrated to extremely attractive for various areas of biomedicine, automotive industries and environmental monitoring [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Hollow-core fiber based FPI exhibits an pressure sensitivity of −23.4 pm/MPa [10]. Fiber-tip micro-bubble based FPI shows a pressure sensitivity of 315 pm/MPa [11]. We present a highly-sensitive pressure sensor based on a fiber in-line MZI, which is fabricated by using femtosecond laser (FS) micromachining and fusion splicing technique. This fiber interferometer is constructed by splicing a short section of twin-core fiber (TCF) between two single mode fibers (SMFs) and the separate cores of the TCF perform as the two interference arms. The ultra-compact size of the fiber interferometer is able to ensure a precise sensing location

Operating principle and fabrication
Gas pressure and temperature experiments
Conclusions

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