RAYLEIGH SCATTERING CHARACTERIZATION OF A LOW-LOSS MGO-BASED NANOPARTICLEDOPED OPTICAL FIBER FOR DISTRIBUTED SENSING

Abstract

We present the fabrication and characterization of a low-loss enhanced backscattering fiber, having the core doped with MgO-based nanoparticles (MgO-NP), for distributed sensing application. The fiber has a scattering increment of 48.9 dB and two-way attenuation of 14.3 dB/m; these are the largest Rayleigh scattering increment paired with the lowest losses for this type of fiber. In this work, we provide a thorough characterization of the fiber performances, and their impact on distributed sensing networks, using scattering-level multiplexing where 2.4 – 4.0 times extension of sensing length can be achieved.