Photonic crystal fiber coupler

Abstract

Fiber couplers made with photonic crystal fibers (PCF) are reported. Two types of PCF were fabricated by means of stacking a group of silica tubes around a silica rod and drawing them. The fiber couplers were made by use of the fused biconical tapered method. With a fiber that had five hexagonally stacked layers of air holes, a 33/67 coupling ratio was obtained, and with a one-layer four-hole fiber, a 48/52 coupling ratio was obtained. The fabrication processes and the characteristics of the PCFs and the PCF couplers are presented.

Specialty Fiber Coupler: Fabrications and Applications

“…The first PCF coupler was fabricated by the FBT method in 2002 with home-made PCFs [10]. With the PCF having only one layer of 4 large holes and having 5 layers of many small holes, the PCF couplers could be fabricated.…”

“…Recently, the HAF coupler has been successfully fabricated by using the FBT method and with a ceramic heater, which had better control in the heating temperature over the conventional hydrogen flame heater [18]. In order to prevent air hole collapsing of the HAF during the fusion process, the ceramic heater temperature was intentionally lowered by a couple of hundred degrees below the one for the conventional SMF coupler [10]. In experiment, it was observed that the coupling action commenced at an elongation length of about 9 mm, which was a little bit longer than the SMF case of 7 mm [11].…”

“…With various specialty fibers with the development of dedicated fabrication methods, specialty fiber couplers have been implemented for their special purposes in each application. B. H. Lee et al reported the fabrication process of the fiber coupler made of photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) by using the FBT method in 2002 [10]. The PCF, a specialty fiber Specialty Fiber Coupler: Fabrications and Applications -Byeong Ha Lee et al…”

The Development of Double Clad Fiber and Double Clad Fiber Coupler for Fiber Based Biomedical Imaging Systems

“…The DCF coupler was realized simply by allowing physical contact between the inner cladding regions of two pieces of DCFs. This process did not require additional fabrication equipment or complex fabrication processes generally used for the conventional fabrication methods such as the side polishing method [11] and the fused bi-conical tapered (FBT) method [12]. To secure the contact, a pair of DCFs was twisted around each other after removing the polymer jackets (the outer cladding) as shown in Fig.…”

Bending Analysis of a Dual-Core Photonic Crystal Fiber

“…It is worthy to note that besides the one-core PCF, multi-core PCFs including dual-core PCFs (DC-PCFs) have also been proposed for special applications. DC-PCFs have been designed for coupling inside PCFs [57][58][59][60], which can be used to achieve compact PCF couplers. Koshiba's group has proposed a wavelength MUX-DEMUX based on a DC-PCF [61], a polarization splitter based on a three-core PCF [62], a narrow band-pass filter [63] and a 1 × 4 power splitter [64] based on multi-core PCFs.…”