Phase sensitivity of hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber to acoustic pressure

Detection of acoustic pressure with optical fiber interferometers has been studied for many years1-3. The conventional solid silica fiber hydrophone was sufficient to prove the concept; however, it has low acoustic sensitivity. This is because 1) the silica glass material has relatively high Young's modulus, which makes the conventional fiber incompressible; 2) the refractive index change resulted from fiber strain has opposite sign with respective to the strain term and hence compromises the acoustic sensitivity. In a hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber (PBF), the fundamental mode is almost entirely confined to the air core, the effective Young's modulus of fiber is expected to be reduced and the undesirable "negative" index effect is anticipated to be greatly decreased. We experimentally measured that the phase sensitivity of the commercial HC-1550-02 PBF and found it is improved by a factor of 15dB compared to a conventional (HNSM-155) single mode fiber, which agrees well with theoretical prediction.