Wide-range pH sensor based on a cascaded MZI up-down tapered hetero-core structure.

In this paper, we describe the first demonstration of an optical fiber sensor based on two cascaded architectures of the Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) with an up-down-tapered (UDT) hetero-core fiber structure for simultaneous pH measurement at two different spatial locations. The two fiber structures, namely structures I and II, were fabricated by sandwiching a 45 mm and 60 mm long piece of no-core fiber (NCF) between two single-mode fibers (SMFs), respectively. By inserting a down-taper between two adjacent up-tapers in the NCF section using the over-fusion splicing technique, the UDT hetero-core fiber structure was achieved.