Press-induced long-period fiber gratings exhibiting strong core-to-cladding mode coupling were formed in photonic crystal fiber. Only one resonance peak was observed over a 600 nm spectral range and the resonant wavelength was tuned over the whole range by tilting a groove plate before pressing the fiber. The resonant wavelength decreased with increasing periodicity of the grating, which was opposite to the trend of the step-index conventional optical fiber. Meanwhile, the resonant wavelength increased with increasing the ambient refractive index, which was also opposite to that of the conventional optical fiber.

A novel temperature sensor device based on a conventional long-period fiber grating but having an improved sensing resolution is presented. By forming a reflector at one cleaved end of the fiber embedding a long-period grating, a fine interference fringe pattern was obtained within the conventional broadband resonant spectrum of the grating. Due to the fine internal structure of the reflection spectrum of the proposed device, the accuracy in reading the temperature-induced resonant wavelength shift was improved. The formation of the self-interference fringe is analyzed and its properties are discussed in detail. The performance of the proposed device is analyzed by measuring the resonant wavelength shift of the device placed in a hot oven under varying temperature. The rate of the fringe shift is measured to be 551 pm/. The rms deviation is 10 pm over a 100 dynamic range, which corresponds to 0.2 in rms temperature deviation. The thermal variation of the differential effective index of the fiber is calculated to be (0.3 0.1)10-6/ by comparing the analytic calculations with the experimental results. The interference fringe shift is revealed to be inversely proportional to the differential effective group index of the fiber, which implies that the shifting rate strongly depends on the type of fibers and also on the order of the involved cladding mode.

We report the empirically obtained conditions for the fusion splicing with photonic crystal fibers (PCF) having large mode areas. By controlling the arc-power and the arc-time of a conventional electric-arc fusion splicer, the splicing loss between two PCFs could be lowered down to 0.2 dB in average. For the splicing PCF with a conventional single mode fiber (SMF), the loss was increased due to the modal field mismatch, but still below 0.45 dB in average. The tensile strength was weakened by the splicing from 2.83 GPa down to 1.04 GPa for the PCF-PCF case and 0.89 GPa for the PCF-SMF one.

We will present the theoretical analysis of and experimental measurements on the transmission characteristics of multi-channel long period fiber gratings in terms of the physical parameters like the separation distance, grating length and number of gratings. These parameters can be used to control the spectral channel spacing, number of channels, loss peak depth, and channel bandwidth of multi-channel long period fiber gratings.

In an ideal fiber grating having a uniform refractive index modulation, the reflection or the transmission spectrum is symmetric with equal amount of side lobes on both sides of the resonant wavelength of the fiber grating. It is observed that a long-period fiber grating made by a non-uniform UV laser beam through a uniform amplitude mask has an asymmetric transmission spectrum. The asymmetric characteristic is explained with Mach-Zehnder effect in the long-period fiber grating. The non-uniform UV laser beam makes also a non-uniform index modulation along the fiber core. Therefore, a beam coupled to a cladding mode at a section of the grating can be re-coupled to the core mode after passing a certain distance. The re-coupled beam makes Mach-Zehnder-like interference with the un-coupled core mode. However, it is presented that the asymmetric phenomenon can be overcome by scanning the UV laser beam along the fiber over the mask. The beam scanning method is able to suffer the same fluence of the UV laser beam on the fiber. Finally, a linearly chirped long-period fiber grating was made using the non-uniform UV laser beam. Due to the asymmetricity the chirping effect was not clearly observed. It is also presented that the beam scanning method could remove the asymmetric problem and recover the typical spectrum of the linearly chirped fiber grating.

In an ideal fiber grating having a uniform refractive index modulation, the reflection or the transmission spectrum is symmetric with equal amount of side lobes on both sides of the resonant wavelength of the fiber grating. It is observed that a long-period fiber grating made by a non-uniform UV laser beam through a uniform amplitude mask has an asymmetric transmission spectrum. The asymmetric characteristic is explained with Mach-Zehnder effect in the long-period fiber grating. The non-uniform UV laser beam makes also a non-uniform index modulation along the fiber core. Therefore, a beam coupled to a cladding mode at a section of the grating can be re-coupled to the core mode after passing a certain distance. The re-coupled beam makes Mach-Zehnder-like interference with the un-coupled core mode. However, it is presented that the asymmetric phenomenon can be overcome by scanning the UV laser beam along the fiber over the mask. The beam scanning method is able to suffer the same fluence of the UV laser beam on the fiber. Finally, a linearly chirped long-period fiber grating was made using the non-uniform UV laser beam. Due to the asymmetricity the chirping effect was not clearly observed. It is also presented that the beam scanning method could remove the asymmetric problem and recover the typical spectrum of the linearly chirped fiber grating.

The analytic expression for the transmission spectrum of cascaded long-period fiber gratings is presented in a closed form. When several identical gratings are cascaded in-series with a regular distance, the transmission spectrum is revealed to have a series of regularly spaced peaks, suitable for multi-channel filters. The analytic solution is obtained by diagonalizing the transfer matrix of each grating unit that is composed of a single grating and a grating-free region between adjacent gratings. The spectrum of the device is simply described with the number of cascaded gratings and a single parameter that has the information of the phase difference between the modes. With the derived equation, the spectral behaviors of the proposed device are investigated. The intensity of each peak can be controlled by adjusting the strength of a single grating. The separation between adjacent gratings determines the spacing between the peaks. The finesse of the peaks can be increased by cascading more gratings. The derived analytic results are compared with the known results of paired gratings and phase-shifted gratings.

We will present the theoretical analysis of and experimental measurements on the transmission characteristics of multi-channel long period fiber gratings in terms of the physical parameters like the separation distance, grating length and number of gratings. These parameters can be used to control the spectral channel spacing, number of channels, loss peak depth, and channel bandwidth of multi-channel long period fiber gratings.

We will discuss performance optimization of strain and temperature sensors based on long period fiber gratings (LPFGs) through control of the temperature sensitivity of the resonant peak shifts. Distinction between the effects of strain and temperature is a major concern for applications to communication and sensing. This was achieved in this work by suppressing or enhancing the temperature sensitivity by adjusting the doping concentrations of GeO2 and B2O3 in the core or cladding. The LPFGs were fabricated with a CO2 laser by the mechanical stress relaxation and microbending methods. The optimized temperature sensitivities were 0.002 nm/ for the suppressed case and 0.28 nm/ for the enhanced case, respectively. These LPFGs were used for simultaneous measurement of strain and temperature. The result indicates the rms errors of 23 µstrain for the strain and 1.3 for the temperature.

We will discuss a novel non-contact removal technique of optical fiber coating in continuous and uninterrupted manner with hot air stream. We observed little degradation of the tensile strength of the optical fiber after removing the protective polymer coating and the mean breaking tensile strength of the stripped optical fiber using non-contact removal method was 5.1 GPa.

The analytic expression for the transmission spectrum of cascaded long-period fiber gratings is presented in a closed form. When several identical gratings are cascaded in-series with a regular distance, the transmission spectrum is revealed to have a series of regularly spaced peaks, suitable for multi-channel filters. The analytic solution is obtained by diagonalizing the transfer matrix of each grating unit that is composed of a single grating and a grating-free region between adjacent gratings. The spectrum of the device is simply described with the number of cascaded gratings and a single parameter that has the information of the phase difference between the modes. With the derived equation, the spectral behaviors of the proposed device are investigated. The intensity of each peak can be controlled by adjusting the strength of a single grating. The separation between adjacent gratings determines the spacing between the peaks. The finesse of the peaks can be increased by cascading more gratings. The derived analytic results are compared with the known results of paired gratings and phase-shifted gratings.

We will present a novel core mode blocker fabricated with hydrogen loaded Ge-B co-doped fiber exposed to the electric arc discharge using local heat exposure. Tunable bandpass filter based on cascaded LPFGs with a core mode blocker inserted between the LPFGs will be also described. The characteristics are: 6.5-nm bandwidth, 30-nm tuning range, and 15-dB dynamic range, respectively. It can be very useful for application to wavelength stabilization and physical sensors.