Very high polarimetric sensitivity to strain of second order mode of highly birefringent microstructured fibre

Microstructured fibres (MSF) or photonic crystal fibres (PCF) possess a number of unique properties enabling a wide range of novel applications either in the telecommunication or in the sensing domain. In this paper we show that highly birefringent (HB) MSF with a dedicated design that allows inscribing fibre Bragg gratings in the MSF core can serve as pressure or stress transducers with extremely large sensitivity of second order mode, while exhibiting a low sensitivity to temperature drifts. Therefore, Bragg gratings inscribed in such MSF may offer a viable alternative to traditional optical fibre sensors of much lower stress sensitivity that require temperature compensation mechanisms and that are not intrinsically capable of distinguishing stress and temperature.