Complete discrimination of strain and temperature using Brillouin frequency shift and birefringence in a polarization-maintaining fiber

This paper presents a novel method that realizes simultaneous and completely discriminative measurement of strain and temperature using one piece of Panda-type polarization-maintaining fibre. Two independent optical parameters in the fiber, the Brillouin frequency shift and the birefringence, are measured by evaluating the spectrum of stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) and that of the dynamic acoustic grating generated in SBS to get two independent responses to strain and temperature. We found that the Brillouin frequency shift and the birefringence have the same signs for strain-dependence but opposite signs for temperature-dependence. In experiment, the birefringence in the PMF is characterized with a precision of similar to 10(-8) by detecting the diffraction spectrum of the dynamic acoustic grating. A reproducible accuracy of discriminating strain and temperature as fine as 3 micro-strains and 0.08 degrees Celsius is demonstrated. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America