Abstract
We discuss the fabrication of hollow-core optical fibers made of borosilicate glass. We show that, despite the high attenuation of the glass relative to silica, the fiber optical losses can be of the same order of magnitude of those obtained by using ultrapure silica glass. Short lengths of the fabricated fibers, used in combination with incoherent optical sources, provide single-mode optical guidance in both near and mid-infrared spectral ranges without any additional optical components.
Highlights
Hollow-core optical fibers (HCs) have recently gained significant interest to a large scientific community [1]
Within the last six years, a novel form of hollow-core optical fiber has been developed, which consists in a simplified HC where a set of detached tubes surrounds a central air core [2,3,4]
By taking into account the refractive index change and the reflection at the glass/air interfaces [16], the attenuation of the DURAN 8330 can be evaluated to be about 40 dB/m at a wavelength of 1000 nm. This is over 4 order of magnitude greater than the attenuation of pure silica glass used currently in the production of conventional optical fibers [17]
Summary
Hollow-core optical fibers (HCs) have recently gained significant interest to a large scientific community [1]. Even the use of glasses with much higher light absorption than silica glass, in the visible and near-infrared spectral range, can be a very interesting route to explore in order to make HC fibers in a more cost-effective way and which are easier to use and implement in short-length optical devices, or in combination with incoherent optical sources. In this context, we discuss the fabrication of borosilicate-based HCs
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