Comparision of the operation efficiency of three fiber optical interferometers

The optical heterodyne method is widely used in various applications. However, the operation efficiency of the conventional Mazh-Zehnder interferometer utilized in the delayed self-heterodyne is rather low. To improve the operation efficiency, two modified interferometer (MZ loop interferometer and ring interferometer) are adopted. We take a simplified method to analyze the efficiency of all the interferometers theoretically, the results show that the efficiency of fiber ring interferometer is the highest while the efficiency of conventional Mazh-Zehnder interferometer is the lowest. The analysis above is confirmed by the unfiltered intensity noise and delayed self- heterodyne experiments.