All-fiber devices based on photonic crystal fibers with integrated electrodes

Abstract

A special kind of microstructured optical fiber is proposed and fabricated in which, in addition to the holey region (solid core and silica-air cladding), two large holes exist for electrode insertion. Either Bi-Sn or Au- Sn alloys were selectively inserted into the large holes forming two parallel, continuous and homogeneous internal electrodes. We demonstrate the production of a monolithic device and its use to externally control some of the guidance properties (e.g. polarization) of the fiber.

Nanomechanical Optical Fiber with Embedded Electrodes Actuated by Joule Heating

“…Many of these efforts were focused on control of dispersion, enhancement of the nonlinearity, reduction of the fiber transmission loss, or increase of sensitivity to environmental conditions in single-material MOFs [5]. Multi-material MOFs have also been developed for added functionality, e.g., hollow-core fibers filled with liquids [6] or gases [7] for sensing, with gases for high-power pulse compression [8,9] and nonlinear effects [10,11], with semiconductors for electronic functionality [12], and with integrated electrodes [13,14] and liquid crystals [15] for optical switching.…”

“…Alternative mechanisms to induce optical switching that have been proposed for such fibers are electrostatic actuation [18] and optomechanical forces [2]. For many applications, forms of electrical actuation are preferred [12,13,14,15,18], but operation at low voltages/low powers would often only be achieved by placing electrically conducting electrodes close to the optically guiding cores, i.e. , by embedding metals into the fiber.…”

Electrostatic actuation of nanomechanical optical fibers with integrated electrodes

“…Nowadays MEMS are mainly fabricated on silicon chips, however the potential of glass-based MEMS has also been investigated 4 , and several groups have already demonstrated electrostatic glass actuators 5,6 . In recent years, different research groups have fabricated multi-material fiber-based devices with integrated conducting wires by pressurizing low melting temperature metal alloy into the holes of microstructured optical fibers [7][8][9] or by deposition of semiconductors and metals into them from chemical precursors 10 . However, this type of post-processing is usually a time consuming approach and limits the device size.…”

Hybrid Optical Fibers – An Innovative Platform for In‐Fiber Photonic Devices

“…The designs presented here indicate the enormous potential of HOFs in optoelectronics, and future work will address the issues of electrically connecting the semiconductor junction located within a fi ber network. [ 189,190 ] A line of work not discussed in this review is the integration of semiconducting nanowires [ 191 ] and even microspheres inside thermally drawn fi bers. [ 192,193 ] With these unconventional fabrications approaches and novel building blocks, innovative ways of trapping light and extracting charges inside optoelectronic fi bers can be realized, paving the way towards large area, fl exible and even wearable optoelectronic systems with effi ciencies on par with current planar and rigid devices.…”