Abstract—Optical techniques for measurement—interferometry,
spectrometry and polarimetry—have long been used
in materials measurement and environmental evaluation. The
optical fiber lends yet more flexibility in the implementation of
these basic concepts. Fiber-optic technology has, for over 30 years,
made important contributions to the science of measurement.
This paper presents a perspective on these contributions which
while far from exhaustive highlights the important conceptual
advances made in the early days of optical fiber technology and the
breadth of appliaton which has emerged. There are also apparent
opportunities for yet more imaginative research in applying
guided-wave optics to emerging and challenging measurement
requirements ranging from microsystems characterization to
cellular biochemistry to art restoration.
Index Terms—Acoustic measurements, chemical analysis, displacement
measurement, gyroscopes, mechanical measurements,
optical fiber measurement applications, optical fiber transducers,
power system measurements, temperature measurements.
F
I. INTRODUCTION
IBER optics has undoubtedly had a profound impact on the
communications industry [1]. This can be traced back to
the seminal papers of Kao and Hockham, and Simon and Spitz
[2], [3], who basically appreciated in the early to mid 1960s that
optical signals could be transmitted along glass or silica fibers
with a loss potentially below that experienced in coaxial copper
cables. Further, unlike copper where skin effect increases loss
with baseband modulation frequency, the loss in optical fibers
could be maintained for all conceivable modulation frequencies.
A little while later, Dyott [4] observed that there were regions
of zero dispersion in the transmission characteristic of silica.
The rest is well-documented history brilliantly encapsulated in
Hecht’s book [1].
But fiber optics was not new in 1965. Glass fibers had already
appeared in ornamental lamps and the basic ideas of the dielectric
waveguide were well established. Using optical fibers to
guide light to and from a place at which a measurement was to be
made had already emerged and had gone from concept to practice.
The first patents had been filed on fiber-optic sensing and
had emerged as a tentative product [5] described in the literature.
At around the same time, Eli Snitzer’s ever-creative intellect
was proposing using fiber optics to transmit phase-modulated