An asymmetric long period fiber grating ͑LPFG͒ with a large attenuation of −47.39 dB and a low insertion loss of 0.34 dB is fabricated by use of focused CO 2 laser beam to carve periodic grooves on one side of the optical fiber. Such periodic grooves and the stretch-induced periodic microbends can effectively enhance the refractive index modulation and increase the average strain sensitivity of the resonant wavelength of the LPFG to −102.89 nm/ m . The resonant wavelength and the peak attenuation of the LPFG can be tuned by ϳ12 nm and ϳ20 dB, respectively, by the application of a stretching force. © 2006 American Institute of Physics. ͓DOI: 10.1063/1.2360253͔ Long period fiber grating ͑LPFG͒ is one of the widely used passive optical fiber devices. Various LPFG fabrication techniques have been demonstrated, including ultraviolet laser irradiation, 1 CO 2 laser heat, 2,3 hydrofluoric acid etching corrugation, 4 and application of periodic microbend. 5 The strain sensitivity obtained for the CO 2 -laser-induced LPFGs without physical deformation is usually very low, only −0.45 nm/ m . 2,3 In this letter, a technique of fabricating asymmetric LPFG by use of focused CO 2 laser beam to carve periodic grooves on one side of the optical fiber is presented. The LPFGs obtained exhibit a large peak transmission attenuation of −47.39 dB and a low insertion loss of 0.34 dB. Moreover, the average strain sensitivity of resonant wavelength of the LPFG is increased to −102.89 nm/ m .Our experimental setup is shown in Fig. 1. A CO 2 laser ͑SYNRAD 48-1͒ with a maximum output power of 10 W, a light-emitting diode light source, and an optical spectrum analyzer ͑HP 70004A͒ were used. The optical fiber ͑Corning SMF-28͒ was situated in the focal plane of the CO 2 laser beam. One of the fiber ends was fixed and a small weight of ϳ5 g was used at the free end of the fiber to avoid the weight-induced macrobend and to provide a tensile strain in the fiber. The focused CO 2 laser beam scanned repeatedly for M times along the X direction at a location, corresponding to the first grating period, of the fiber via a two-dimensional optical scanner under the computer control. Then the laser beam was shifted by a grating period along the Y direction and scanned repeatedly for M times to generate the next grating period. This scanning and shifting process was carried out for N times ͑N is the number of grating periods͒ until the final grating period was created. The above mentioned process was repeated for K cycles until a high quality LPFG was produced. The repeated scanning of the focused CO 2 laser beam created a local high temperature in the fiber, which led to the gasification of SiO 2 on the surface of the fiber. As a result, periodic grooves were carved on the fiber as shown in Fig. 2. Such grooves induce periodic refractive index modulation along the fiber axis due to the photoelastic effect, thus creating a LPFG. The typical depth and width of the grooves obtained in our LPFGs were ϳ15 and ϳ50 m, respectively. The depth of the grooves dep...

By selective filling of one of the air holes in the photonic crystal fiber, the fundamental core mode can be effectively coupled to the fundamental mode of the adjacent liquid rod waveguide at the resonant wavelength with extremely high temperature sensitivity. The spectral power of the rod mode can be filtered out by fusion splicing the selectively infiltrated photonic crystal fiber with conventional single-mode fiber, resulting in a sharp dip in the transmission spectrum. Such a device is demonstrated in our experiment by filling standard 1.46 refractive index liquid into one of the air holes of the commercially available photonic crystal fiber by use of femtosecond laser-assisted selective infiltration technique. The average temperature sensitivity achieved is 54.3 nm/ C.

This paper reviews high temperature sensing applications based on fiber Bragg gratings fabricated by use of femtosecond laser. Type II fiber Bragg gratings fabricated in the silica fiber can sustain up to 1200 ℃ while that fabricated in the sapphire fiber have the good thermal stability up to 1745 ℃.

We demonstrate a fiber in-line Mach-Zehnder interferometer based on an inner air-cavity with open micro-channel for high-pressure sensing applications. The inner air-cavity is fabricated by combining femtosecond laser micromachining and the fusion splicing technique. The micro-channel is drilled on the top of the inner air-cavity to allow the high-pressure gas to flow in. The fiber in-line device is miniature, robust, and stable in operation and exhibits a high pressure sensitivity of ∼8,239  pm/MPa.

A fiber in-line Mach-Zehnder interferometer is fabricated through selective infiltrating of two adjacent air holes of the innermost layer in the solid core photonic crystal fiber, assisted by femtosecond laser micromachining. The liquid infiltrated has higher refractive index than that of the background silica, and, hence, the two rods created can support a guide mode with lower effective refractive index than that of silica. The interference is produced by the fiber fundamental mode and the guide mode. The free spectral range (FSR) of the interferometer is found to be dependent on the photonic crystal fiber length, and a large FSR corresponds to a short photonic crystal fiber length. Such an interferometer device is robust and exhibits extremely high temperature sensitivity (∼7.3 nm/°C for the photonic crystal fiber length of 3.4 cm) and flexible operation capability.