Analysis of a novel optical fiber interferometer with common mode compensation

An optical fiber interferometer formed when the unused output of a fiber Mach-Zehnder interferometer is fed back through a length of fiber to the unused input port is discussed. For sensor applications, the resulting optical circuit combines many features of a Mach-Zehnder with the high measured sensitivity of a resonant fiber recirculating delay line. This analysis shows that suitable choice of path lengths preserves high measurand sensitivity, yet it permits complete common-mode compensation in which the effects of all perturbations which uniformly affect the interferometer vanish