Highly sensitive refractive index sensor based on two cascaded special long-period fiber gratings with rotary refractive index modulation.

We present a refractive index (RI) sensor based on a fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) formed by two cascaded special long-period fiber gratings (LPFGs) with rotary refractive index modulation (RLPFGs), in which the coupling occurred between the guided mode and the high-order asymmetric cladding mode. The experimental results show that the RI sensitivity of a refractometer with an interaction length of 40 mm is up to 58.8 nm/RI in the range of 1.