Design and analysis of a freeform surface lens coupler applied in hollow‐core photonic crystal fiber resonant optic gyros

Abstract

In this study, a novel freeform surface lens coupler is designed to realize the coupling functions in the hollow‐core photonic crystal fiber (HCPCF) resonator optical gyroscope. One surface of the lens is an ellipsoid. Coupling of the two HCPCF loop's ports can be directly accomplished via reflection on the ellipsoid surface. The other surface of the lens is the Biconic Zernike surface. Transmitting through the above two surfaces, the coupling between the intracavity and extracavity is completed. In this paper, simulations were performed based on two types of HCPCFs, a hollow‐core photonic bandgap fiber of HC19‐1550 and a state‐of‐the‐art nested antiresonant nodeless fiber. The volume of the lens coupler is calculated to be approximately 4 × 2 × 4 mm3. The simulation results show that the intracavity coupling loss can be as low as 0.011 dB, and the coupling loss between the intracavity and extracavity can be as low as 0.4 dB. Compared with the traditional fusion scheme between hollow‐core fiber and polarization‐maintaining fiber, the freeform surface lens coupler in this paper can achieve lower coupling loss and higher resonance fineness. Compared with other spatial coupling schemes, it has lower coupling loss and fewer coupling components.