OFS at UESTC: From Single-Frequency and Multi-Frequency Lasers to Optical Frequency Combs

The advancement of the optical fiber sensing (OFS) technology is strongly linked to the development of light sources, while lasers play a crucial role in determining the performances of OFS systems for diverse sensing applications. Over the past 15 years, the OFS group at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) has focused on the OFS with various light sources. Here, we review the history of the OFS advancement at UESTC and conduct an in-depth examination of the sensing strategies involving advanced light sources and cutting-edge sensors. By employing single-frequency lasers (SFLs), multi-frequency lasers (MFLs), and optical frequency combs (OFCs) across various sensing scenarios, the research team reports a number of novel OFS devices and systems, and showcases their sensing capabilities from point sensors to distributed sensing, and sensor networks. We highlight the role of novel light sources, particularly integrated OFCs, in enhancing the OFS. Our findings show that OFCs, with outstanding merits of the ultrahigh coherence, broad bandwidth, ultrafast detectability, and multi-channel parallelism, can significantly improve the capabilities and performances of the OFS used for detecting both physical and biochemical parameters. To conclude, we provide a systematic overview of the OFS advancement at UESTC, with SFLs/MFLs, as well as OFCs, and discuss the technical challenges and prospects, as well as potential developments of the OFC empowered the OFS. Also, a roadmap is proposed for transitioning the OFCs-based OFS technology from laboratory settings to practical applications.