Fiber optic sensors are typically used with expensive tunable lasers or optical spectrum analyzers for wavelength interrogation. We propose to replace the tunable laser by a broadband optical source incorporated with a novel thin linewidth acousto-optic tunable filter. It utilizes optical beam expanders constituted by photonic crystal rows of air holes in LiNbO(3) waveguide. A new design is numerically studied for a short structure (with 32 photonic crystal rows) by a two-dimensional finite-difference time-domain method. Extrapolation of these results to larger structure sizes (about 1 cm) demonstrates the possibility to develop compact interrogators with 0.4 pm wavelength resolution and 40 nm tunable range around 1550 nm.
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