Lu, XinSoto, Marcelo AlfonsoThévenaz, Luc2017-05-112017-05-112017-05-11201710.1117/12.2264636https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/137193WOS:000413808800120Temperature and strain discrimination is experimentally demonstrated in an elliptical-core polarization-maintaining fiber by making use of Rayleigh-based distributed birefringence measurements and the frequency shift of the correlation peak obtained by standard coherent optical time-domain reflectometry. The high sensitivity of coherent Rayleigh sensing and the very distinct behavior of birefringence makes the two quantities clearly discriminated, resulting in temperature and strain accuracies of ~ 40 mK and ~ 0.5 με, respectively, for distributed measurements with a 2 m spatial resolution.Fiber optics sensorsDistributed fiber sensingBirefringenceCoherent Rayleigh scatteringtext::conference output::conference proceedings::conference paper