Microstructured optical fiber temperature sensor based on the self-phase modulation effect.

In this paper, we proposed a highly sensitive temperature sensor based on self-phase modulation (SPM) in an in-house fabricated microstructured optical fiber (MOF) which had three rings of air holes. The temperature sensing performance was evaluated by detecting the 3 dB bandwidth of SPM spectrum with the variation of temperature at different pump wavelengths and average pump power. At the pump wavelength of 1400 nm with the average pump power of 600 mW, the temperature sensitivity was obtained to be as high as 1.296 nm/°C. Moreover, the theoretical simulation was carried out, the results of which corresponded well with the experiment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first experimental study concerning SPM-based temperature sensing. This work proves experimentally and theoretically a new temperature sensing mechanism drawing on the SPM effect in optical fibers, which is expected to develop temperature sensors of low cost, simple structure and high sensitivity.