Optical characteristic variations in gamma ray irradiated polarization-maintaining optical fibers

Abstract

Polarization-maintaining (PM) optical fibers are introduced in fiber optic communication systems and optical fiber sensors to improve their performances. It is known that characteristics of optical fibers vary for radiation exposures, e.g., a transmission loss increment. It is important to clarify the characteristic variations of PM fibers by radiations in their applications. The radiation induced optical characteristic variation is also useful for an application of optical fibers including PM fibers as radiation sensors. In this paper, optical characteristic variations in gamma ray irradiated PM optical fibers with low modal birefringence were experimentally clarified indenting to apply a polarization optical time domain reflectometry to a distributed radiation sensor. It was confirmed that the transmission losses for both polarization modes in elliptical jacket fibers increased similar to ordinary silica based single-mode fibers, where the difference of transmission losses of two polarization modes was enhanced by the irradiation. We also clarified that the modal birefringence of the elliptical jacket fibers increased for the irradiation for the first time by the beat length measurement using the wavelength sweeping technique.