Wavefront Splitting Fiber Mach-Zehnder Interferometer Modulated by the White Light Fraunhofer Diffraction

Stability, robustness, sensitivity, and reproducibility are important parameters in the interferometry. We propose a wavefront splitting fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) to achieve such performances. A polyethylene terephthalate (PET) film splits the wavefront of a Gaussian beam emitted from...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of lightwave technology 2019-09, Vol.37 (17), p.4216-4221
Main Authors: Ma, Rende, Li, Yan, Cao, Hongzhong, Li, Xiaoping, Pan, Yue, Man, Zhongxiao, Dong, Xinyong, Xia, Yunjie
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Collimation
Diffraction
Fiber collimator
fiber Mach–Zehnder interferometer
Gaussian beams (optics)
Insertion loss
Interference fringes
Lenses
Light diffraction
Mach-Zehnder interferometers
Optical fiber communication
Optical fiber sensors
Optical fibers
Organic chemistry
Parameter sensitivity
Polyethylene terephthalate
Refractivity
Reproducibility
Sensitivity
Splitting
Thickness
Visibility
wave front splitting
Wave fronts
White light
white light Fraunhofer diffraction
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Summary:Stability, robustness, sensitivity, and reproducibility are important parameters in the interferometry. We propose a wavefront splitting fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) to achieve such performances. A polyethylene terephthalate (PET) film splits the wavefront of a Gaussian beam emitted from the first fiber collimator. Then, the Gaussian beam is focused into a single mode fiber by another collimator, constituting a stable and robust fiber MZI. The effective spectral width is larger than 390 nm, which is wide enough for constructing a sensitive fiber MZI. The COMSOL multiphysics simulation and the experimental results demonstrate that this MZI is based on the multi-beam interference. Thanks to the low insertion loss of the fiber MZI, two types of stable and repeatable interference fringes are obtained when the sampling accuracy of the optical spectrum analyzer is as high as 0.1 nm. It ensures that the fiber sensor based on this MZI has a high resolution. For the first type of interference fringe, the two adjacent resonant wavelengths, respectively, shift -0.78 and -0.81 nm when salinity increases one part per thousand, showing high sensitivities. The low order interference fringe has a larger sensitivity. However, its visibility may be small due to the modulation of the second type of interference fringe that has small sensitivity to the refractive index of the sample. Since the PET film has uniform thickness, the fiber MZI can ensure good reproducibility. It can be widely utilized in detecting physical, chemical, or biological quantities.
ISSN:0733-8724
1558-2213
DOI:10.1109/JLT.2019.2921987