Temperature insensitive fiber interferometry

Abstract

© 2019 Optical Society of America. We show for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, the interference pattern of a Mach–Zehnder interferometer to be fully insensitive to temperature. This is achieved using silica glass made hollow core fiber and operating it at the temperature of −71°C, which is very close to the temperature at which the thermal expansion of silica glass crosses zero. Our results highlight for the first time an alternative to bulky and difficult-to-align, ultra-low-expansion glass-based optical cavities for metrology and sensing.