Enhancement of temperature sensitivity of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer based on a polymer-overlaid microfiber

摘要

A simple technique to effectively enhance the temperature sensitivity of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) by using a microfiber with low index polymer coating is theoretically and experimentally investigated. We successfully improve the temperature sensitivity of the polymer-overlaid microfiber MZI to be -6.68 nm/°C around a temperature of 25°C, which is 13 times higher than that of the microfiber MZI without polymer coating. A linear temperature sensitivity of 10.44 pm~(-1)/°C was achieved in the spatial frequency domain after Fourier transform.