A magnetic field sensor using a dual-frequency optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) incorporating cascaded magnetostrictive alloy-fiber Bragg grating-Fabry Perot (MA-FBG-FP) and FBG-FP filters is proposed and demonstrated. In the OEO resonant cavity, two microwave signals are generated, whose oscillation frequencies are determined by the FBG-FP filter and MA-FBG-FP filter filters with two ultra-narrow notches and two laser sources. Due to the characteristics of MA and FBG, the two generated microwave signals show different magnetic field and temperature sensitivities. By monitoring the variations of two oscillating frequencies and the beat signal using a digital signal processor, the simultaneous measurement for the magnetic field and temperature can be realized. The proposed sensor has the advantages of high-speed and high-resolution measurement, which make it very attractive for practical magnetic field sensing applications. The sensitivities of the proposed OEO sensor for magnetic field and temperature are experimentally measured to be as high as −38.4MHz/Oe and −1.23 or −2.45 GHz/°C corresponding to the MA-FBG-FP filter and FBG-FP filter, respectively.

A novel differential intensity-measurement high-sensitivity refractive index (RI) sensor based on cascaded dual-wavelength fiber laser and single-mode-no-core-hollow-core-no-core-single-mode (SNHNS) structure is proposed and demonstrated. The sensing unit consists of one uniform fiber Bragg grating (FBG) and an SNHNS structure as all-fiber interferometer filter. The dual-wavelength fiber laser has a ring cavity composed of two FBGs with central wavelengths of 1550.10nm and 1553.61nm. Through monitoring the wavelength shift and the output power difference of the dual-wavelength fiber laser, the simultaneous measurement for RI and temperature is realized. In our experiment, the proposed fiber laser sensor exhibits high RI sensitivities of −193.1dB/RIU and 174.8dB/RIU in the range of 1.334-1.384. The relative variation of output power at the two FBG wavelengths shows a higher RI sensitivity of −367.9dB/RIU with better stability, which is greater than the traditional modal interferometer structure. Meanwhile, the temperature sensitivity of the proposed sensor is 8.53 × 10⁻³nm/°C, and the changes of laser output power caused by temperature are −0.223dB/°C and 0.215dB/°C.

A temperature-insensitive magnetic field sensor with high interrogation performance and large measurement range based on an optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) merging a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. In the OEO loop, a finite impulse response (FIR)-microwave photonic filter (MPF) and an infinite impulse response-MPF are cascaded to select the oscillating frequency and further suppress the side mode. The center frequency of the FIR-MPF, which is composed of a non-coherent broadband optical source, a MZI, a dispersion compensating fiber (DCF), and a photodetector, is determined by dispersion of DCF and the free spectral range (FSR) of the MZI jointly. In one arm of the MZI, a section of optical fiber is bonded with a giant magnetostrictive material (GMM) to achieve the magnetic field sensing, where the GMM is acted as a magnetic field-strain transducer. When the magnetic field varies, the FSR of the MZI will be changed, resulting in an oscillating frequency shift of the OEO. Therefore, a high interrogation performance magnetic field measurement can be achieved by simply monitoring frequency change of microwave signal generated by OEO in the microwave domain. Moreover, by placing a section of unprocessed fiber with appropriate length in the other arm of the MZI, the temperature cross-talk for the magnetic field can be alleviated greatly. In the experiment, the magnetic field sensitivity of 1.33 MHz/mT with a large range of 20.9 mT to 58 mT is obtained and the measurement error induced by temperature is as low as 0.09 mT.

A temperature self-calibrated potential of hydrogen (pH) sensor based on the single mode fiber-tapered dual core photonic crystal fiber-single mode fiber (SMF-TDCPCF-SMF) structure cascaded with a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) is proposed and demonstrated. The TDCPCF structure formed Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) is modified with a coating of graphene oxide/polyvinyl alcohol (GO/PVA) hybrid hydrogel to realize the measurement of pH, and the uncoated FBG is used to calibrate temperature. In our experiment, the sensitivity coefficient of 0.69 nm/pH with R²=0.99 and the hysteresis loss of less than 0.007 are achieved within the pH range from pH 4.00 to pH 9.85. The measured response time from pH 7.00 to pH 4.00, 6.00 and 9.85 are no higher than 10s. Moreover, the resonant wavelengths of MZI and FBG also exhibit good linear relationship with the temperature sensitivity coefficient of 0.15 nm/°C (R²=0.99) and 0.09 nm/°C (R²=0.97) respectively. It is demonstrated successfully that the proposed sensor has broad application prospects in the field of environmental monitoring, biological sensing and chemical analysis, due to the good performance of the temperature self-calibrated pH monitoring, repeatability, linearity, response time and reversibility.

The active mode-locking (AML) technique has been widely used in erbium-doped fiber lasers to generate picosecond pulse trains. Here we propose a novel active mode-locking dual-loop optoelectronic oscillator (AML-DL-OEO), which can generate microwave frequency comb (MFC) signals with adjustable comb spacings. Based on this scheme, the order of harmonic mode-locking is dramatically decreased for a certain AML driving frequency compared with a single-loop AML-OEO. Thus, the supermode noise caused by harmonic mode-locking can be efficiently suppressed. In addition, the sidemodes are well suppressed by the dual-loop architecture. An experiment is performed. MFC signals with different comb spacings are generated under fundamental or harmonic mode-locking states. AML-DL-OEO systems with different length differences between two loops are implemented to evaluate supermode noise suppression capability. The performance of the generated MFC signals is recorded and analyzed.

Optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) has received growing attentions from researchers in the field of demodulations for optical sensors because of its excellent performance of combining optics and electronics in signal processing. In this article, we present a wideband-tunable OEO for angular velocity measurement. The OEO consists of two cascaded microwave photonic filters (MPFs), namely, a dispersion-induced MPF for mainly determining the OEO's oscillating frequency and a two-tap MPF for the fine selection of the oscillating frequency. With proper control of polarization of the optical signal, the angular velocity is first mapped into the central frequency shift of the dispersion-induced MPF, which will then cause an oscillating frequency shift of the OEO. This approach ensures a large-scale factor for the angular velocity measurement due to the fact that a small phase change in the optical domain causes a large frequency shift in the electrical domain. An experiment is conducted to validate the scheme. The experimental results show that the oscillating frequency shift can reach nearly 700 MHz when the system rotates at about 1 rad/s by using a 560-m Sagnac loop. In addition, the measurement range can be achieved to 5.24 rad/s with a 2.5-GHz oscillating frequency tuning range and the maximum measurement error is 0.06 rad/s.