Longitudinally graded optical fibers

Abstract

Described herein, for the first time to the best of our knowledge, are optical fibers possessing significant compositional gradations along their length due to longitudinal control of the core glass composition. More specifically, MCVD-derived germanosilicate fibers were fabricated that exhibited a gradient of up to about 0.55 weight percent GeO 2 per meter. These gradients are about 1900 times greater than previously reported for fibers possessing longitudinal changes in composition. The refractive index difference is shown to change by about 0.001, representing a numerical aperture change of about 10 %, over a fiber length of less than 20 m. The lowest attenuation measured from the present longitudinally-graded fiber (LGF) was 82 dB/km at a wavelength of 1550 nm, though this is shown to result from extrinsic process-induced factors and could be reduced with further optimization. The stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) spectrum from the LGF exhibited a 4.4 dB increase in the spectral width, and thus reduction in Brillouin gain, relative to a standard commercial single mode fiber, over a fiber length of only 17 m.Fibers with longitudinally uniform (i.e., not gradient) refractive index profiles but differing chemical compositions among various core layers were also fabricated to determine acoustic effects of the core slug method. The refractive index of the resulting preform varies by about ± 0.00013 from the average. Upon core drilling, it was found that the core slugs had been drilled off-center from the parent preform, ii resulting in semi-circular core cross sections that were unable to guide light. As a result, optical analysis could not be conducted. Chemical composition data was obtained, however, and is described herein.A third fiber produced was actively doped with ytterbium (Yb 3+ ) and fabricated similarly to the previous fibers. The preforms were doped via the solution doping method with a solution of 0.015 M Yb 3+ derived from ytterbium chloride hexahydrate and 0.30 M Al 3+ derived from aluminum chloride hexahydrate. The doped preform was engineered to have two core layers of differing chemical composition, resulting in both a gradient refractive index profile as well as a gradient acoustic profile. While exhibiting higher loss than the original LGF, the Yb 3+ -doped fiber showed slightly better SBS suppression with preliminary calculations showing at least 6 dB reduction in Brillouin gain. Lastly, reported here is a straight-forward and flexible method to fabricate silica optical fibers of circular cladding cross-section and rectilinear cores whose aspect ratio and refractive index profile changes with position along the fiber in a deterministic way. Specifically, a modification to the process developed to produce longitudinally-graded optical fibers, was employed. Herein reported are MCVDderived germanosilicate fibers with rectangular cores where the aspect ratio changes by nearly 200 % and the average refractive index changed by about 5 %. Fiber losses were measured to be about 50 dB/km. Such rec...