Phase Sensitivity to Acoustic Pressure of Microstrustured Optical Fibers: A Comparison Study

Abstract

Recently, photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) have attracted many researchers because of their unique properties, and design flexibility that can’t be realized by conventional fibers. One of the fruitful areas of research is the optical fiber hydrophone. In this paper, the finite element solver (FES), COMSOL multiphysics, is used to study and compare the response to acoustic pressure of a hollow-core photonic band gap fiber (HC-PBF), a solid-core photonic crystal fiber (SC-PCF), and a conventional single-mode fiber (SMF) for different acoustic pressures in the frequency range from 10 kHz to 50 kHz. The key structural factors affect the sensitivity to acoustic pressure (S) of the microstructured fibers are studied and a mathematical formula describes the relation of S and the dominant structural factor is proposed. Simulation results of the investigated optical fibers show that the normalized responsivity (NR) of the HC-1550, LMA-5, and SMF are -344 dB, -367.5 dB, and -366 dB, respectively. The proposed simulation results are in good agreement with published theoretical and experimentally measured results. The proposed results indicate the significance of the HC-PBFs in the future hydrophone systems and are useful for the design of microstrustured optical fibers for sensing applications.