Abstract

To date, we have developed a temperature sensor based on multimodal interference in a plastic optical fiber (POF) with an extremely high sensitivity. Here we experimentally evaluate the influence of annealing (heat treatment) of the POF on the temperature sensitivity at room temperature. We show that the temperature sensitivity is enhanced with increasing annealing temperature, and that, by annealing the POF at 90°C, we obtain a temperature sensitivity of +2.17 nm/°C, which is approximately 3 times larger than that without annealing.

© 2017 Optical Society of America