Kavli Affiliate: Alireza Marandi
| First 5 Authors: Luis Costa, Zhongwen Zhan, Alireza Marandi, ,
| Summary:
Simultaneously sensing and resolving the position of measurands along an
optical fiber enables numerous opportunities, especially for application in
environments where massive sensor deployment is not feasible. Despite
significant progress in techniques based on round-trip time-of-flight
measurements, the need for bidirectional propagation imposes fundamental
barriers to their deployment in fiber communication links containing
non-reciprocal elements. In this work, we break this barrier by introducing a
position-resolved sensing technique based on the interference of two
weakly-coupled non-degenerate modes of an optical fiber, as they walk-off
through each other. We use this mode-walk-off interferometry to experimentally
measure and localize physical changes to the fiber under test (axial strain and
temperature) without the typical requirement of round-trip time-of-flight
measurements. The unidirectional propagation requirement of this method makes
it compatible with fiber links incorporating non-reciprocal elements,
uncovering a path for multiple sensing applications, including ultra-long range
distributed sensing in amplified space-division-multiplexed telecommunication
links.
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