Cascaded fiber-optic Fabry-Perot interferometers with Vernier effect for highly sensitive measurement of axial strain and magnetic field.

We report a highly sensitive fiber-optic sensor based on two cascaded intrinsic fiber Fabry-Perot interferometers (IFFPIs). The cascaded IFFPIs have different free spectral ranges (FSRs) and are formed by a short section of hollow core photonic crystal fiber sandwiched by two single mode fibers. With the superposition of reflective spectrum with different FSRs, the Vernier effect will be generated in the proposed sensor and we found that the strain sensitivity of the proposed sensor can be improved from 1.6 pm/με for a single IFFPI sensor to 47.14 pm/με by employing the Vernier effect. The sensor embed with a metglas ribbon can be also used to measure the magnetic field according to the similar principle. The sensitivity of the magnetic field measurement is achieved to be 71.57 pm/Oe that is significantly larger than the 2.5 pm/Oe for a single IFFPI sensor.