Side-polished fibers

Abstract

We report a reproducible technique of making side-polished fibers by embedding fibers in silicon V grooves and by polishing them mechanically. Details of V grooves and polishing techniques are described. The attenuation characteristics of polished fibers were measured by a liquid-drop method; the results are in excellent agreement with existing theoretical predictions. To facilitate comparisons, we cast expressions for the attenuation constant in terms of three generalized parameters: the V and b parameters for the fiber and a new generalized parameter V(ex) for the external medium. By using these generalized parameters, we can study the effects of the external medium on the attenuation constant of side-polished fibers in great detail, including in particular the region where the attenuation changes precipitously.

Measurement of the degree of salinity of water with a fiber-optic sensor

“…2 One of the parameters that has been measured by use of this technique is the refractive index of liquid media. 3 In this paper we propose an application of these refractive-index sensors to determine the degree of salinity of water.…”

Long Period Gratings in New Generation Optical Fibers

“…Obviously, a first type of Dshaped fiber can be readily obtained from a standard SMF (see Fig. 1(a)) by side-polishing (Tseng & Chen, 1992). On the other hand, a special D-shaped fiber is commercially available from KVH Industries, Inc.: it is a polarization maintaining SMF.…”

“…Additionally, once the effects of depositing a thin high RI (HRI) layer onto the cladding over the grating region have been discovered, huge sensitivity enhancements in comparison to bare LPGs have been obtained due to the so-called modal transition (Del Villar et al, 2005;Cusano et al, , 2006a. On the other side, it is worth noting that new fiber designs such as D-shaped fibers and photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) (with solid and air core) capable to offer new perspective in sensing and telecommunications applications have attracted the attention of several researcher groups and scientists (Tseng & Chen, 1992;Smith et al, 2004;Gordon et al, 2007;Kaiser et al, 1974;Knight et al, 1996). However to increase the impact of the new generation fibers technology, in-fiber components such as grating filters are required.…”

“…This proximity allows access to the core electromagnetic fields more easily than in standard SMF and thus D-fiber is extremely attractive especially in sensing applications. A D-shaped fiber can be readily obtained from a standard SMF by sidepolishing (Tseng & Chen, 1992) or, alternatively, is commercially available from KVH Industries, Inc. Gordon et al, 2007). The possibility to combine LPGs with D-fibers has represented and still represents an open challenge for the scientific community.…”

High Sensitive Fiber Optic Temperature Sensor Based on a Side-polished Single-mode Fiber Coupled to a Tapered Multimode Overlay Waveguide

“…Side-polished fibers (SPF) are the building blocks of many single-mode fiber components such as directional couplers, polarizers, modulators, switches and wavelength filters [1][2][3][4][5] due to the accessibility of a significant fraction of the evanescent field of the propagating mode close to the polished surface. The evanescent field coupling between a SPF and an appropriate multimode overlay waveguide (MMOW) has yielded an important platform to realize various fiber optic sensors such as refractive index, pH and temperature sensors [6][7][8][9][10][11][12].…”