Infrared (IR) fibers offer a versatile approach to guiding and manipulating light in the IR spectrum, which is becoming increasingly more prominent in a variety of scientific disciplines and technological applications. Despite well-established efforts on the fabrication of IR fibers in past decades, a number of remarkable breakthroughs have recently rejuvenated the field-just as related areas in IR optical technology are reaching maturation. In this review, we describe both the history and recent developments in the design and fabrication of IR fibers, including IR glass and single-crystal fibers, multimaterial fibers, and fibers that exploit the transparency window of traditional crystalline semiconductors. This interdisciplinary review will be of interest to researchers in optics and photonics, materials science, and electrical engineering.

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Abstract:We report on the progress of bismuth oxide glass holey fibers for nonlinear device applications. The use of micron-scale core diameters has resulted in a very high nonlinearity of 1100 W -1 km -1 at 1550 nm. The nonlinear performance of the fibers is evaluated in terms of a newly introduced figure-of-merit for nonlinear device applications. Anomalous dispersion at 1550 nm has been predicted and experimentally confirmed by soliton self-frequency shifting. In addition, we demonstrate the fusionsplicing of a bismuth holey fiber to silica fibers, which has resulted in reduced coupling loss and robust single mode guiding at 1550 nm. 440-442 (2003)

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