Sensitivity-enhanced temperature sensor with cascaded fiber optic Sagnac interferometers based on Vernier-effect

Abstract A novel fiber optic temperature sensor has been proposed and experimentally demonstrated with ~9 times sensitivity enhancement by using two cascaded Sagnac interferometers. These two Sagnac interferometers consist of the same type of polarization maintaining fibers with slightly different lengths. The working principle is analogous to a Vernier scale. One interferometer acts as filter, while the other is for temperature sensing. The envelope of the cascaded sensor shifts much more than single one with a certain enhancement factor, which related to the free space range difference between the filter and sensor interferometers. Experimental results show that the temperature sensitivity is enhanced from −1.46 nm/°C based on single Sagnac configuration to −13.36 nm/°C.