Novel techniques for the fabrication of holey optical fibers

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Recently developed optical fibers rely on an array of air holes in the cladding to confine light to the fiber core as opposed to conventional telecommunications fibers that require a refractive index difference produced by different composition glasses in the core and cladding regions. Holey fibers have been fabricated by drawing an array of tubes stacked around a solid central core. In this paper, we describe a new technique to produce the holes (or pores) in the cladding region. These new fibers have been made by drawing a preform, consisting of a porous outer cladding region surrounding a solid central core region, into a fiber. During the fiber drawing process, the pores initially present in the preform cladding region are drawn into small, long, thin tubular pores. Controlling the dimensions and distribution of the pores in the preform can control the physical dimensions and distribution of the pores in the fiber. In some of the preforms, the porous cladding region in the preform was prepared by sol gel techniques. The preform fabrication process and fiber drawing process used to produce these new holey fibers as well as the results of the morphological study elucidating the size, shape and distribution of the porous phase are presented.

This publication has 0 references indexed in Scilit: