Complete measurement of fiber modal content by wavefront analysis.

We propose and demonstrate the use of a wavefront analyzer based on lateral shearing interferometry to characterize the modal content of multimode fibers. This wavefront measurement technique is applied to large mode area fibers, and allows us to recover both the intensity and relative phase of each guided mode. This constitutes an innovative complete characterization of the beam, and might be used as a probe in deterministic active wavefront correction techniques.

[1]  Johan Nilsson,et al.  Modal power decomposition of beam intensity profiles into linearly polarized modes of multimode optical fibers. , 2004, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision.

[2]  J. Chanteloup.  Multiple-wave lateral shearing interferometry for wave-front sensing. , 2005, Applied optics.

[3]  J Primot,et al.  Extended hartmann test based on the pseudoguiding property of a hartmann mask completed by a phase chessboard. , 2000, Applied optics.

[4]  J Primot,et al.  Three-wave lateral shearing interferometer. , 1993, Applied optics.

[5]  G. Mourou,et al.  Single-shot wave-front measurements of high-intensity ultrashort laser pulses with a three-wave interferometer. , 1998, Optics letters.

[6]  Thomas Kaiser,et al.  Measuring the spatial polarization distribution of multimode beams emerging from passive step-index large-mode-area fibers. , 2010, Optics letters.

[7]  Thomas Kaiser,et al.  Complete modal decomposition for optical fibers using CGH-based correlation filters. , 2009, Optics express.

[8]  J W Nicholson,et al.  Spatially and spectrally resolved imaging of modal content in large-mode-area fibers. , 2008, Optics express.

[9]  J Primot,et al.  Collective phase measurement of an array of fiber lasers by quadriwave lateral shearing interferometry for coherent beam combining. , 2010, Optics letters.

[10]  S. Ramachandran,et al.  Fiber-modes and fiber-anisotropy characterization using low-coherence interferometry , 2009 .

[11]  O. Shapira,et al.  Complete modal decomposition for optical waveguides , 2005, (CLEO). Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics, 2005..

[12]  Cesar Jauregui,et al.  High-speed modal decomposition of mode instabilities in high-power fiber lasers. , 2011, Optics letters.

[13]  J. Fini,et al.  Measuring the Modal Content of Large-Mode-Area Fibers , 2009, IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics.