High extinction-ratio dual thin-taper fiber interferometer fabricated by arc-discharge and its performance as sensors

We demonstrate an arc discharge fabrication method for a high extinction-ratio (ER) single mode fiber (SMF) based dual thin-taper modal interferometer (MI) and investigate the performance of the MI as thermal and refractive index (RI) sensors. With the optimized discharge parameters of a commercial fusion splicer and a simple mechanical taper setup, the MI with about 24 dB ER could be achieved if fabricating two thin-tapers with 20-mu m waist diameter on the common SMF. It can be used as a highly sensitive thermal sensor with a thermal sensitivity of -72.8 pm/degrees C. However, for the high ER MI, the propagation position of the cladding mode is more close to that of core mode in the MI. Hence, its sensitivity to ambient RI variation is not very high, about 10.299 nm/RIU. If using it for dual parameter measurement, its thermal and RI measurement resolutions are +/- 1.1 degrees C and +/- 0.009, respectively, and are 6.6 and 2.4 times bigger than those of the other fiber sensors. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.