Abstract
A highly sensitive sensor, which can detect the temperature and strain simultaneously, is proposed using a hollow-core anti-resonant fiber with composite nested tubes. The sensing fiber contains two kinds of nested tubes, and two different sensing mechanisms, the resonance coupling effect and the intermodal interference, are realized in the same section of a hollow-core anti-resonant fiber fully filled with ethanol. Five conjoined nested anti-resonant tubes are introduced to suppress the confinement loss of the higher-order mode LP(02). One hybrid conjoined nested tube, which consists of a half-circular anti-resonant tube and a half-circular resonant tube, is introduced to induce a resonant coupling between the LP(02) mode in the core and the dielectric mode in the nested resonant tubes. Numerical investigations demonstrate the shifts of the feature wavelengths of the resonance coupling effect, and the intermodal interference shows different velocities with temperature and strain, while a simultaneous measurement of temperature and strain can be realized with high sensitivities (3.36 nm/°C and -0.003 nm/με to temperature and strain, respectively). Since the sensor can be fabricated by full infiltration with liquid into the large-size core and cladding tubes of hollow-core anti-resonant fibers, and special post-processing, such as selective infiltration or coating, is notneeded. The proposed sensors based on hollow-core anti-resonant fibers with functional liquid infiltration provide a more efficient and versatile platform for the temperature and strain sensing.