A 1-mm-diameter fiber-optic photoreceiver with a side-surface interface is proposed. By controlling the scattering part embedded in the fiber, the receiving sensitivity along the fiber's axis is successfully flattened over a 5-m-length. The simulation results suggest a potential for a large-area photo-detector of $sim$ 3-m-spherical diameter.

We have designed a novel fiber-optic light concentrator with scattering layers and evaluated the light concentration characteristics by ray-trace simulations as functions of the parameters of the incident light angle and wavelength, as well as the waveguide structure. Unlike well-known luminescent solar concentrators, in our models, illuminating light is directly captured through the proposed waveguide structure. The optical efficiency in our fiber-optic models is remarkably improved in long-length regions compared with that in simple slab waveguides. In addition, the waveguide length required to effectively collect light is extended to 300mm and 1.5m for optical fibers with 1- and 10-mm core diameters, respectively, which are ten times longer than those in slab waveguides with an equivalent scale. Because of the cylindrical structure of optical fibers, we have also evaluated the sensitivity of our models to surrounding light. Consequently, an obvious directional property containing single or three peaks of the sensitivity is clarified, and their widths can be tuned by changing the width of the scattering parts. These results suggest that our models are suited for sensor devices such as optical receiving antennas, rather than simple light concentrators. Finally, we model a fiber-optic probe as an application and evaluate the light concentration characteristics when the concentrator is serially concatenated with a normal optical fiber.