Symmetry selective cladding modes coupling in ultrafast-written fiber Bragg gratings in two-mode fiber

The lower order cladding mode resonances of a fiber Bragg grating (FBG) are sensitive to fiber bending but their spectral density makes their response to bending very complex. In this work we present a simple method to reduce and control the number of low order cladding mode resonances via FBGs written in a two-mode fiber (TMF) with an ultrafast laser. Owing to the larger core size of the TMF, a slight break of the cylindrical asymmetry of the grating patterns can be induced when using femtosecond side-irradiation with a small change in the writing condition. This allows us to control the mode families coupled by the grating, and in particular to those modes that have positive or negative bending responses along certain bend directions. Experimental results demonstrate that several lower-order neighboring-cladding mode pairs coupled by the asymmetric TMFBG have antagonistic loss responses (by several dB) for different bending directions, thus allowing full 2D bending measurements with many applications in shape sensing. Finally, this device has similar advantages as tilted FBGs, i.e. temperature de-correlation and the possibility of increasing the signal to noise ratio by averaging simultaneous measurements on several pairs of resonances.