We demonstrated a high-sensitivity strain sensor based on an in-fiber Fabry-Perot interferometer (FPI) with an air cavity, which was created by splicing together two sections of standard single-mode fibers. The sensitivity of this strain sensor was enhanced to 6.0  pm/με by improving the cavity length of the FPI by means of repeating arc discharges for reshaping the air cavity. Moreover, such a strain sensor has a very low temperature sensitivity of 1.1  pm/°C, which reduces the cross sensitivity between tensile strain and temperature.

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We demonstrated a unique rectangular air bubble by means of splicing two sections of standard single mode fibers together and tapering the splicing joint. Such an air bubble can be used to develop a promising high-sensitivity strain sensor based on Fabry-Perot interference. The sensitivity of the strain sensor with a cavity length of about 61 μm and a wall thickness of about 1 μm was measured to be up to 43.0 pm/με and is the highest strain sensitivity among the in-fiber FPI-based strain sensors with air cavities reported so far. Moreover, our strain sensor has a very low temperature sensitivity of about 2.0 pm/°C. Thus, the temperature-induced strain measurement error is less than 0.046 με/°C.

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We demonstrated a compact and highly-sensitive curvature sensor based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer created in a photonic crystal fiber. Such a Mach-Zehnder interferometer consisted of a peanut-like section and an abrupt taper achieved by use of an optimized electrical arc discharge technique, where only one dominating cladding mode was excited and interfered with the fundamental mode. The unique structure exhibited a high curvature sensitivity of 50.5 nm/m^-1 within a range from 0 to 2.8 m^-1, which made it suitable for high-sensitivity curvature sensing in harsh environments. Moreover, it also exhibited a temperature sensitivity of 11.7 pm/°C.