Development of offset locking based distributed sensor, and, Study of polarization effects in optical fibers

This thesis is composed of two main sections.; The first section is the development of an optical fiber sensor. This new sensor system has been simulated by a Matlab program that considers the distributed feedback lasers' broader linewidth compared with that of frequency stabilized Nd:YAG lasers.; The second section involves research on polarization effects in the optical fiber. In this thesis it is proven that only three states of polarization are required to determine the principle state of polarization vector. In addition, polarization effects in fiber Bragg gratings are investigated in this work. To measure the polarization dependent loss of the fiber Bragg grating for the reflection wavelength, an optical circulator is used. A problem arises since the circulator's polarization dependent loss contributes to the measurement result; this effect is often ignored. In this thesis, a test set has been developed to eliminate this uncertainty effect through a three-step procedure using the Jones Matrix method.