We reported an optical fiber based temperature sensor with mK-order resolution, wide temperature range and excellent long term stability. The sensor composes of a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) as the sensing element, an HCN gas cell for absolute frequency reference. A distributed feedback diode laser with current modulation is used as the light source. To overcome the frequency-sweep nonlinearity of the laser, an auxiliary Fabry-Perot interferometer with free spectrum range of 10 MHz is employed. A cross-correlation algorithm is employed to calculate the center frequency difference between the FBG and the gas cell. With the proposed configuration, a temperature resolution of 0.41 mK was demonstrated in experiment. To the best knowledge, this is the first time that an mK order temperature resolution has been achieved by optical fiber sensor.

Date Published: 1 July 2015
PDF: 4 pages
Proc. SPIE 9655, Fifth Asia-Pacific Optical Sensors Conference, 965508 (1 July 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2184239

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9655:
Fifth Asia-Pacific Optical Sensors Conference
Byoungho Lee; Sang-Bae Lee; Yunjiang Rao, Editor(s)