High electric field measurement with slab coupled optical sensors using nonlinear calibration

We describe the application of SCOS technology in non-intrusive, directional and spatially localized measurements of high electric fields. When measuring electric fields above a certain threshold, SCOS measurement sensitivity starts varying to a great extent and the linear approximation that assumes sensitivity to be constant breaks down. This means that a comprehensive nonlinear calibration method is required for accurate calibration of both low and high electric fields, while linear calibration can only be accurately applied for low fields. Nonlinear calibration method relies on the knowledge of the variability of sensitivity, while linear calibration relies on approximation of sensitivity with a constant value, which breaks down for high fields. We analyze and compare the two calibration methods by applying them to a same set of measurements. We measure electric field pulses with magnitudes from 1 MV/m to 8.2 MV/m, with sub-300 ns rise time and fall-off time constant of 60 mu s. We show that the nonlinear calibration very accurately predicts all measured fields, both high and low, while the linear calibration becomes increasingly inaccurate for fields above 1 MV/m.