For the first time, an all-solid tellurite optical glass rod with a transversely disordered refractive index profile was fabricated successfully as a medium to study the transverse localization of light and near-infrared (NIR) optical image transport. Two tellurite glass compositions of 70TeO-8LiO-17WO-3MoO-2NbO (TLWMN) and 75TeO-15ZnO-5NaO-5LaO (TZNL) which have a small difference in softening temperature (about 0.5 °C), compatible thermal expansions from room to 400 °C and broad transmission range from about 0.4 up to 6.0 µm were developed for a successful fabrication process. The tellurite transversely disordered optical rod (TDOR) consists of high and low-index units (TLWMN and TZNL, respectively). The diameter of each unit is 1.0 μm and their refractive index difference was about 0.095 at 1.55 µm. Experimental results showed that after a CW probe beam at 1.55 μm propagated in a 10-cm-long tellurite TDOR, the beam became localized. In addition, NIR optical images at 1.55 μm of numbers on a test target were transported. The captured images at the output facet of the tellurite TDOR are visually clear with high contrast and high brightness. The quality of our transported optical images can be comparable or higher than the results which were obtained by a polymer Anderson localized fiber and by a commercially available multicore imaging optical fiber.
We experimentally demonstrate the transport of NIR optical images in a 10-cm-long all-solid tellurite optical fiber with a transversely-disordered refractive index profile. The optical image of three vertical slits whose widths are as small as 14 μm on a test target is transported successfully at wavelengths of 1.44, 1.50, 1.55 and 1.60 μm. The transported images are obtained with high contrast, high brightness and high matching ratio. These features are very potential in biological and medical imaging, especially in the NIR wavelength range from 0.7 to 2.5 μm which is considered to be most efficient for biological tissues and biomedical objects.
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