Design of Polarization-Maintaining Optical Fiber Suitable for Thermally-Diffused Expanded Core Techniques

Hirohisa YOKOTA, Emiko OKITSU, Yutaka SASAKI

Summary :

Thermally-diffused expanded core (TEC) techniques brought the fibers with the mode fields expanded by thermal diffusion of core dopants. The techniques are effective to the reduction of splice or connection losses between the different kind of fibers, and are applied to the integrations of thin film optical devices in fiber networks, the fabrications of chirped fiber gratings, and so on. In the practical use of TEC techniques, the fibers are heated high temperature of about 1650 because of a short peried of time in processing by microburners. The mode field diameter expansion (MFDE) ratio, which is defined as the ratio of the mode field diameter in the fiber section having the core expanded and that unexpanded, is desired to be more than 2.0 from the viewpoint of loss reduction in industrial uses of the TEC techniques. When the TEC techniques are applied to polarization-maintaining optical fibers (PM fibers), such as PANDA fibers, both core dopants and stress applying part (SAP) dopants diffuse simultaneously. So the MFDE ratio is less than two without mode field deformation in conventional PANDA fibers which are practically used as PM fibers. In this paper a PANDA fiber design suitable for the TEC techniques is newly proposed. The fiber has 1.28 µm cutoff wavelength and the mode field diameter is about 11 µm before core expansion at 1.3µm wavelength.

• Publication: IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications Vol.E80-B No.4 pp.516-521
• Publication Date: 1997/04/25
• Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Special Issue on Optical Fibers and Their Applications)

Authors

Hirohisa YOKOTA
Emiko OKITSU
Yutaka SASAKI

Keyword

polarization-maintaining fiber,  TEC fiber,  stress analysis,  beam propagation method