Micro Fabry-Perot (F-P) interferometers (MFPIs) are machined in a single-mode fiber (SMF) and a photonic crystal fiber (PCF) by using a near-infrared femtosecond laser, respectively. The strain and temperature characteristics of the two MFPIs with an identical cavity length are investigated and the experimental results show that the strain sensitivity of the PCF-based MFPI is smaller than that of the SMF-based MFPI due to their different waveguide structures, while the two MFPIs have close temperature sensitivities which are much smaller than that of an in-line SMF etalon sensor reported previously. These MFPIs in silica fibers are compact, stable, inexpensive, capable for mass-production and easy fabrication, offering great potentials for wide sensing applications.

We report a highly sensitive refractive index (RI) sensor based on three cascaded single-mode fiber tapers, in which a weak taper is sandwiched between the two tapers to improve the sensitivity of the sensor. Experimental results show that the sensitivity of the device is $0.286\mathrm{nm}$ for a 0.01 RI change, which is about four times higher than that of the normal two-cascaded-taper-based Mach–Zehnder interferometer. In addition, the sensitivity of the device could be enhanced by tapering a longer and thinner middle weak taper. Such kinds of low-cost and highly sensitive fiber-optic RI sensors would find applications in chemical or biochemical sensing fields.

We demonstrate an all-fiber optical Fabry–Perot interferometer (FPI) strain sensor whose cavity is a microscopic air bubble. The bubble is formed by fusion splicing together two sections of single-mode fibers (SMFs) with cleaved flat tip and arc fusion induced hemispherical tip, respectively. The fabricated interferometers are with bubble diameters of typically $\sim 100\mathrm{\mu m}$. Strain and temperature sensitivities of fabricated interferometers are studied experimentally; a strain sensitivity of over $4\mathrm{Pm}/\mathrm{\mu \epsilon }$ and a thermal sensitivity of less than $0.9\mathrm{Pm}/°\mathrm{C}$ is obtained.

A novel fiber-optic in-line etalon formed by splicing a section of hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HCPCF) in between two single-mode fibers is proposed and demonstrated, for the first time to our knowledge. Such a HCPCF-based etalon acts as an excellent optical waveguide to form a Fabry–Perot interferometer and hence allows the cavity length to be as long as several centimeters with good visibility as the transmission loss of the HCPCF is much smaller than that of a hollow core fiber; this offers great potential to generate a practical dense fiber-optic sensor network with spatial frequency division-multiplexing. This novel etalon is demonstrated for strain measurement, and the experimental results show that a good visibility of 0.3 and a strain accuracy of better than $\pm 5\mu \epsilon$ are achieved.