VCSEL-powered and polarization-maintaining fiber-optic grating vector rotation sensor

Optics Express, Vol. 21, Issue 16, pp. 19097-19102 (2013).

Tuan Guo, Fu Liu, Fa Du, Zhaochuan Zhang, Chunjie Li, Bai-Ou Guan, and Jacques Albert.

 

Institute of Photonics Technology, Jinan University, Guangzhou 510632, China and

Suzhou Institute of Advanced Study, University of Science and Technology of China, Suzhou 215123, China and

Department of Electronics, Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario K1S 5B6, Canada.

 

Abstract

A compact fiber-optic vector rotation sensor in which a short section of polarization-maintaining (PM) fiber stub containing a straight fiber Bragg grating (FBG) is spliced to another single mode fiber without any lateral offset is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. Due to the intrinsic birefringence of the PM fiber, two well-defined resonances (i.e. orthogonally polarized FBG core modes) with wavelength separation of 0.5 nm have been achieved in reflection, and they exhibit a high sensitivity to fiber rotation. Both the orientation and the angle of rotation can be determined unambiguously via simple power detection of the relative amplitudes of the orthogonal core reflections. Meanwhile, instead of using a broadband source (BBS), the sensor is powered by a commercial vertical cavity surface emitting laser (VCSEL) with the laser wavelength matched to the PM-FBG core modes, which enables the sensor to work at much higher power levels (~15 dB better than BBS). This improves the signal-to-noise ratio considerably (~50 dB), and makes a demodulation filter unnecessary. Vector rotation measurement with a sensitivity of 0.09 dB/deg has been achieved via cost-effective single detector real time power measurement, and the unwanted power fluctuations and temperature perturbations can be effectively referenced out.

© 2013 OSA

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