Workplace for manufacturing devices based on optical fiber tapers

Many important optical fiber components are based on tapered optical fibers. A taper made from a single-mode optical fiber can be used, e.g., as a chemical sensor, bio-chemical sensor, or beam expander. A fused pair of tapers can be used as a fiber directional coupler. Fiber tapers can be fabricated in several simple ways. However, a tapering apparatus is required for more sophisticated fabrication of fiber tapers. The paper deals with fabrication and characterization of fiber tapers made from a single-mode optical fiber. A tapering apparatus was built for producing devices based on fiber tapers. The apparatus is universal and enables one to taper optical fibers of different types by a method utilizing stretching a flame-heated section of a silica fiber. Fiber tapers with constant waist length and different waist diameters were fabricated. The transition region of each fiber taper monotonically decreased in diameter along its length from the untapered fiber to the taper waist. The fiber tapers were fabricated with a constant drawing velocity, while the central zone of the original single-mode fiber was heated along a constant length. The spectral transmissions of the manufactured fiber tapers with different parameters were measured by the cut-back method.