Analysis of the air holes' geometry influence on longitudinal strain sensitivity of microstructured fiber Bragg gratings

In this work we present a novel highly Ge doped microstructured fiber design dedicated for fiber Bragg grating (FBG) inscription and longitudinal strain sensing. Three series of the reported fiber differentiated by air-hole diameters were drawn and presented. After numerical analysis of the propagation conditions (with effective refractive index, loss and mode area calculated) in the real structures, the fibers were subjected to femtosecond FBG inscription. We show the resulting typical FBG spectra, as well as measure the longitudinal strain sensitivity of the fabricated samples and its dependence on the microstructure geometry. An increase of approx. 4% in the Bragg wavelength strain sensitivity was noticed for an increase of the large air-hole diameter of approx. 10%.