Consideration of chiral optical fibres

Abstract

Circular birefringence is a property of chiral materials. In this work, we consider the use of chiral materials in optical fibres to produce circularly birefringent optical fibres and in fibres where a contrast in circular birefringence contributes to forming the waveguide. (-)-menthyl methacrylate is also investigated as a possible material for the fabrication of such fibres.

Applications of microstructured polymer optical fibers

“…The use of polymers and the correspondingly lower processing temperatures allows for the possibility of incorporating chiral materials into optical fibres [10] -chiral materials are typically organic. This allows for circular birefringence to be introduced into optical fibres through the material properties, rather than through geometric effects such as fabricating a spun fibre with a helical structure [11].…”

Orbital angular momentum modes in dielectrically chiral-core fibers

“…Notice that so far for OAM generation, the reported fibers are almost made of achiral media or with structural chirality. In fact, depending on the relationship between the size of chiral structures and optical wavelength, there are two kinds of practical fibers involving chirality: structurally chiral fibers [25][26][27][28] and dielectrically chiral fibers [29][30][31][32][33][34]. In the former, the characteristic length scale of the chiral structures is larger than or comparable to the wavelength of interest, while in the latter, the constituting materials are partly or entirely replaced by chiral media.…”

“…Practically, a dielectrically chiral fiber can be realized by incorporating a very small amount of random chiral molecules as a phase material into the core materials before or during fiber drawing, while keeping all other design parameters, such as core diameter, refractive-index difference, and index profile, intact [30,33,36]. Researchers have developed a solution doping technique that readily incorporates chiral molecules into the background of the polymer optical fiber [33,[36][37][38][39].…”

Menthol-based chiral copolymers for polymer optical fibres (POF)

“…Therefore, we considered using chiral polymers to generate circular birefringence in POF. 10 Herein, we develop a solid and robust chiral polymer for the fabrication of optically active POF, which offers an alternative approach to the investigation of circular birefringence in optical fibres.…”