Optical Waveguide Theory

The ability to integrate complex electronic and optoelectronic functionalities within soft and thin fibers is one of today's key advanced manufacturing challenges. Multifunctional and connected fiber devices will be at the heart of the development of smart textiles and wearable devices. These devices also offer novel opportunities for surgical probes and tools, robotics and prostheses, communication systems, and portable energy harvesters. Among the various fiber-processing methods, the preform-to-fiber thermal drawing technique is a very promising process that is used to fabricate multimaterial fibers with complex architectures at micro- and nanoscale feature sizes. Recently, a series of scientific and technological breakthroughs have significantly advanced the field of multimaterial fibers, allowing a wider range of functionalities, better performance, and novel applications. Here, these breakthroughs, in the fundamental understanding of the fluid dynamics, rheology, and tailoring of materials microstructures at play in the thermal drawing process, are presented and critically discussed. The impact of these advances on the research landscape in this field and how they offer significant new opportunities for this rapidly growing scientific and technological platform are also discussed.

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Advanced Multimaterial Electronic and Optoelectronic Fibers and Textiles

Uniformly sized, structured spherical particles can be made in large quantities and across a wide range of sizes by an ingenious technique involving heating and drawing out multi-component fibres. An innovative scalable process described here uses fluid instability in a core-shell fibre to produce a line of spherical particles internal to the fibre. Thermal processing of the fibre leads to a capillary instability effect that causes break-up of the core material and generation of perfectly smooth spheres. The process can generate spheres from 1 mm in diameter to as small as 50 nm. The shell fibre can contain multiple core fibres, leading to parallelization of the process. Finally, the authors show that they can generate complex multicomponent spheres, including 'Janus' and 'beach-ball' particles, through the precise arrangement of multiple starting materials. Possible applications for engineered structures of this type include controlled-release drug delivery and catalysis. From drug delivery1,2 to chemical and biological catalysis3 and cosmetics4, the need for efficient fabrication pathways for particles over a wide range of sizes, from a variety of materials, and in many different structures has been well established5. Here we harness the inherent scalability of fibre production6 and an in-fibre Plateau–Rayleigh capillary instability7 for the fabrication of uniformly sized, structured spherical particles spanning an exceptionally wide range of sizes: from 2 mm down to 20 nm. Thermal processing of a multimaterial fibre8 controllably induces the instability9, resulting in a well-ordered, oriented emulsion10 in three dimensions. The fibre core and cladding correspond to the dispersed and continuous phases, respectively, and are both frozen in situ on cooling, after which the particles are released when needed. By arranging a variety of structures and materials in a macroscopic scaled-up model of the fibre, we produce composite, structured, spherical particles, such as core–shell particles, two-compartment ‘Janus’ particles11, and multi-sectioned ‘beach ball’ particles. Moreover, producing fibres with a high density of cores allows for an unprecedented level of parallelization. In principle, 108 50-nm cores may be embedded in metres-long, 1-mm-diameter fibre, which can be induced to break up simultaneously throughout its length, into uniformly sized, structured spheres.

https://math.mit.edu/~xdliang/publication/KaufmanTa2012.pdf

Structured spheres generated by an in-fibre fluid instability

Recent advances in soft optical glass fiber and fiber lasers

The field of hybrid optical fibers is one of the most active research areas in current fiber optics and has the vision of integrating sophisticated materials inside fibers, which are not traditionally used in fiber optics. Novel in-fiber devices with unique properties have been developed, opening up new directions for fiber optics in fields of critical interest in modern research, such as biophotonics, environmental science, optoelectronics, metamaterials, remote sensing, medicine, or quantum optics. Here the recent progress in the field of hybrid optical fibers is reviewed from an application perspective, focusing on fiber-integrated devices enabled by including novel materials inside polymer and glass fibers. The topics discussed range from nanowire-based plasmonics and hyperlenses, to integrated semiconductor devices such as optoelectronic detectors, and intense light generation unlocked by highly nonlinear hybrid waveguides.

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Hybrid Optical Fibers – An Innovative Platform for In-Fiber Photonic Devices

Optical fibres heavily doped with alumina are shown to exhibit an exceptionally low Brillouin gain coefficient and an athermal Brillouin frequency response. Such fibres could prove useful for applications that employ fibre sensing or require high-power fibre laser systems.

Sapphire-derived all-glass optical fibres

Advancements in semiconductor core optical fiber

Silica-clad optical fibers comprising a core of crystalline germanium were drawn using a molten core technique. With respect to previous fibers drawn using a borosilicate cladding, the present fibers exhibit negligible oxygen despite being fabricated at more than twice the melting point of the germanium. The counterintuitive result of less oxygen when the fiber is drawn at a higher temperatures is discussed. The measured propagation loss for the fiber was 0.7 dB/cm at 3.39 μm, which is the lowest loss reported to date.

Silica-clad crystalline germanium core optical fibers.

Silicon optical fibers fabricated using the molten core method possess high concentrations of oxygen in the core [Opt. Express 16, 18675 (2008)] due to dissolution of the cladding glass by the core melt. The presence of oxygen in the core can influence scattering, hence propagation losses, as well as limit the performance of the fiber. Accordingly, it is necessary to achieve oxygen-free silicon optical fibers prior to further optimization. In this work, silicon carbide (SiC) is added to the silicon (Si) core to provide an in situ reactive getter of oxygen during the draw process. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM), energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDX), and powder x-ray diffraction (P-XRD) are used to verify that the glass-clad silicon optical fibers possess very low oxygen concentrations and that the SiC is consumed fully during the reactive molten core fabrication. Optical measurements indicated a reduction in light scattering out of the silicon core as expected. However, the measured attenuation of about 10 dB/cm, which is consistent with existing low-oxygen-content silicon fibers, implies that scattering might not be the dominant source of loss in these molten core-derived silicon fibers. More generally, this work shows that the high temperature processing of optical fibers can be an asset to drive chemical reactions rather than be limited by them.

Reactive molten core fabrication of silicon optical fiber

The photoelastic constants of the alumina component in aluminosilicate optical fibers are evaluated and determined to be p11=−0.237±0.020 and p12=−0.027±0.012, thus confirming that the low and negative pij characteristics of bulk alumina are conserved as part of a binary aluminosilicate glass system in optical fiber form. In order to enumerate these values, the strain- and stress-optic coefficients of two fibers (one with an aluminosilicate core and one with a pure silica core) were measured by applying mechanical tension or twist, respectively, to the fibers and measuring changes to an optical system as a function of the mechanical deformation. In the former, the strain-optic coefficient (eOC) is measured directly by recording changes to the free spectral range of a ring fiber laser. In the latter, the stress-optic coefficient (σOC) is found by measuring the change in polarization angle after linearly polarized light propagates through a segment of twisted test fiber. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first such measurement of its type, i.e., the retrieval of the component photoelastic constants, with their signs, of a multicomponent glass. Binary glass compositions wherein the constituents have opposite signs of the photoelastic constant (such as the aluminosilicates) have the potential to give rise to extremely low values of the Brillouin gain coefficient.

Stephanie Morris

Papers

Sapphire-derived all-glass optical fibres

Advancements in semiconductor core optical fiber

Silica-clad crystalline germanium core optical fibers.

Reactive molten core fabrication of silicon optical fiber

Pockels’ coefficients of alumina in aluminosilicate optical fiber