In this paper, the strain sensitivity of a two-mode birefringent holey fiber is measured in the spectral domain. In a simple experimental setup comprising a broadband source, a polarizer, a two-mode birefringent holey fiber under varied elongations, an analyzer and a compact spectrometer, the spectral interferograms are resolved. These are characterized by a specific wavelength, the equalization wavelength, at which spectral interference fringes have the highest visibility (the largest period) due to the zero group optical path difference between the fundamental, the LP01 mode and the higher-order, the LP11 mode. The spectral interferograms with the equalization wavelength are processed by a new method to retrieve the phase as a function of the wavelength. From the retrieved phase functions corresponding to different elongations of a two-mode birefringent holey fiber under test, the spectral strain sensitivity is obtained. Using this approach, the intermodal spectral strain sensitivity was measured for two orthogonal (x and y) polarizations.

Date Published: 18 December 2012
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 8697, 18th Czech-Polish-Slovak Optical Conference on Wave and Quantum Aspects of Contemporary Optics, 86971D (18 December 2012); doi: 10.1117/12.2000274

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8697:
18th Czech-Polish-Slovak Optical Conference on Wave and Quantum Aspects of Contemporary Optics
Jan Peřina Jr.; Libor Nozka; Miroslav Hrabovský; Dagmar Senderáková; Waclaw Urbańczyk; Ondrej Haderka; Libor Nožka, Editor(s)