Photonic crystal fiber strain sensor based on cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometer

Abstract

In this paper, a novel intensity modulated strain sensor is proposed and demonstrated by employing a solid core photonic crystal fiber (PCF)-based cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometer, in which a middle collapsed region is introduced at the middle point of the PCF to improve the sensitivity of the sensor. Experimental results show that this proposed structure has high temperature stability without any compensation process and a high sensitivity of 15.5 dBm/mε over range of 1.3 mε can be achieved.