Investigation of fiber Bragg grating based mode-splitting resonant sensors

In this paper, we report on theoretical investigation of split mode resonant sensors based on fiber Bragg grating (FBG) ring resonators and pi-shifted fiber Bragg grating (pi-FBG) ring resonators. By using a pi-shifted Bragg grating ring resonator (pi-FBGRR) instead of a conventional fiber Bragg grating ring resonator (FBGRR), the symmetric and antisymmetric resonance branches (i.e., the eigen-modes of the perturbed system) show peculiar and very important features that can be exploited to improve the performance of the fiber optic spectroscopic sensors. In particular, the pi-FBGRR symmetric resonance branch can be taylored to have a maximum splitting sensitivity to small environmental perturbations. This optimal condition has been found around the crossing points of the two asymmetric resonance branches, by properly choosing the physical parameters of the system. Then, high sensitivity splitting mode sensors are theoretically demonstrated showing, as an example, a strain sensitivity improvement of at least one order of magnitude over the state-of-the-art. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America