Ultrafast Laser Fabrication of Novel Fiber Mach-Zehnder Interferometer Sensors and Its Cost-Effective Alternative Manufacturing Methods (Invited Paper)

The recent progresses of fiber sensor fabrication in our group are reviewed.Novel inline fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer(MZI) sensors with various structures are proposed and manufactured by femtosecond laser fabrication and fusion splicing for high-quality sensing of refractivity-sensitive parameters such as temperature,concentration,humidity,pressure,stress and strain: a) for an MZI sensor with a trench on a single-mode fiber,the refractive index(RI) sensitivity of acetone vapor is about 104 nm/RIU(refractive index unit) and the temperature sensitivity is 51.5 pm/℃ from 200 to 875 ℃;b) For an MZI consisting of two micro-air-cavities,the sensitivity is 501.5 nm/RIU and the detection limit is 1.994×10-6 RIU at the refractive index of 1.4;c) to reduce the fabrication cost,a new fusion-splicing based method is proposed to fabricate MZI sensors;the sensitivity is 664.57 nm/RIU with a detection limit of 1.5×10-6 RIU and its cost is tens of times cheaper than those of commercialized long period fiber Gratings;Also,5×10-5 acetone vapors are successfully detected by the MZI sensors coated with zeolite thin films.