Stepwise fabrication of arbitrary fiber optic tapers.

This work reports a modified flame-brush technique to fabricate fiber tapers with arbitrary waist profiles. The flame-brush approach is used to produce small step reductions in the fiber diameter, or step-tapers, with a constant speed flame brush sweep, while the fiber is uniformly stretched. Arbitrary waist profiles in tapers are fabricated by approximating the taper diameter function to any monotonic function of the fiber length while combining a superposition of step-tapers. This method to produce the arbitrary profiles is described and a set of tapers with dissimilar transition regions are fabricated for its validation.

[1]  K. Hill,et al.  Biconical-taper single-mode fiber coupler. , 1981, Optics letters.

[2]  Gilberto Brambilla,et al.  Ultra-low-loss optical fiber nanotapers. , 2004, Optics express.

[3]  Mervyn J Miles,et al.  Melt‐drawn scanning near‐field optical microscopy probe profiles , 1996 .

[4]  S Pricking,et al.  Tapering fibers with complex shape. , 2010, Optics express.

[5]  Timothy A. Birks,et al.  Supercontinuum generation in photonic crystal fibers and optical fiber tapers: a novel light source , 2002 .

[6]  C. Pannell,et al.  Heat transfer modelling in CO2 laser processing of optical fibres , 1998 .

[7]  Takenobu Suzuki,et al.  Directly draw highly nonlinear tellurite microstructured fiber with diameter varying sharply in a short fiber length. , 2012, Optics express.

[8]  T. Birks,et al.  Shape of fiber tapers , 1992 .

[9]  M. Rochette,et al.  A generalized heat-brush approach for precise control of the waist profile in fiber tapers , 2011 .

[10]  Paul Wilmott,et al.  On a mathematical model for fiber tapering , 1989 .

[11]  Kenneth O. Hill,et al.  Low-loss highly overcoupled fused couplers: Fabrication and sensitivity to external pressure , 1988 .

[12]  R. Kashyap,et al.  Highly Symmetric Optical Fiber Tapers Fabricated With a CO$_{2}$ Laser , 2007, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[13]  H. Giessen,et al.  Tailoring the soliton and supercontinuum dynamics by engineering the profile of tapered fibers. , 2010, Optics express.

[14]  T. Andersen,et al.  Deep-blue supercontinnum sources with optimum taper profiles--verification of GAM. , 2012, Optics express.

[15]  J R Taylor,et al.  Zero-dispersion wavelength decreasing photonic crystal fibers for ultraviolet-extended supercontinuum generation. , 2006, Optics express.

[16]  P. Hambley,et al.  Theoretical, Numerical, and Experimental Analysis of Optical Fiber Tapering , 2007, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[17]  Gilberto Brambilla,et al.  Fabrication of optical fibre nanowires and their optical and mechanical characterisation , 2006 .

[18]  A. Rauschenbeutel,et al.  Design and optimization of broadband tapered optical fibers with a nanofiber waist. , 2010, Optics express.

[19]  David J. Richardson,et al.  Optical fiber nanowires and microwires: fabrication and applications , 2009 .

[20]  Ole Bang,et al.  Optimum fiber tapers for increasing the power in the blue edge of a supercontinuum-group-acceleration matching. , 2011, Optics letters.