The paper proposed and demonstrated a novel splicing points tapered SMF-PCF-SMF structure Mach-Zehnder interferometric refractive index sensor for the first time.
The paper built a structure model of splicing points tapered SMF-PCF-SMF structure Mach-Zehnder interferometric refractive index sensor to numerically study the refractive index sensing characteristics, and optimizing the structure parameters to improve the sensitivity.
Experimentally fabricated the splicing points tapered SMF-PCF-SMF structure Mach-Zehnder interferometric refractive index sensor and realized the sensitivity of 260.8 nm/RIU, compared with sensitivity of 224.2 nm/RIU of direct splicing SMF-PCF-SMF Mach-Zehnder mode interferometer with PCF length of 4 cm, the sensitivity increased by 16.3%.