Stepwise fabrication of arbitrary fiber optic tapers

Abstract

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.

Characterization of arbitrary fiber taper profiles with optical microscopy and image processing algorithms

“…They can be inserted as inputs to the software in the taper-rig, as described elsewhere. 6 The Fig. 1 shows the stitched image scaled to fit in this page, the x-scale is 2.34 : 1 and the y-scale is 27.7 : 1.…”

“…To illustrate the procedure, a non-biconical taper is characterized, which is produced by the stepwise technique to fabricate arbitrary tapers. 6 The problem of characterizing the fiber taper device may be useful if one needs to use fiber tapers with arbitrary profiles, as in the case of its use in nonlinear fiber optic experiments. 7-9…”

Asymmetric fiber tapers fabricated with a pulsed CO2laser

“…The repeated superposition of step tapers after each beam sweep may produce any desired monotonic transition functions in the taper with small fluctuations in the fiber diameter. 8 For the demonstration of the process, two tapers with dissimilar transitions were produced. A taper having a waist with uniform diameter having two different gaussian transitions was produced.…”

“…The first one generalizes the heat-brush approach 7 and the second one uses an adaptation of the flame-brush technique as described by the authors of this work. 8 This last work, named stepwise method, is related to a technique to fabricate tapers with dissimilar transitions, each one having a profile of a monotonic function. By using the combination of a pulsed CO 2 laser heat source to soften the fiber and the stepwise technique, the authors demonstrate the preliminary results that indicate the feasibility of fabricating asymmetric tapers with a taper rig having the heat source controlled by switching the carbon dioxide laser at a proper frequency and duty-cycle.…”

Comparative Study of Microfiber and Side-Polished Optical Fiber Sensors for Refractometry in Microfluidics

“…Both methods require careful control and precise halting of the process, usually by monitoring the optical power travelling through the fiber. Methods reported in the literature for the fabrication of microfiber include heating a fiber section with CO 2 laser or a flame together with a computer controlled pulling system [22], [23]. However, a dedicated microfiber fabricating rig was not available to us at this time.…”