Abstract
The chromatic dispersion and the refractive index of poly(methyl methacrylate) polymer optical fibers (POFs) have been characterized in this work by using a tunable femtosecond laser and a Streak Camera. The characterization technique is based on the measurement of the time delays of light pulses propagating along POFs at different wavelengths. Polymer fibers of three different lengths made by two manufacturers have been employed for that purpose, and discrepancies lower than 3% have been obtained in all cases.
Highlights
Due to their flexibility and ease of use, poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) polymer optical fibers (POFs) have very interesting characteristics for short-haul communications links, as well as for other applications in fields such as optical sensing, illumination, and light amplification and lasing [1,2,3,4,5]
Pulse broadening along the POF is mainly caused by two dispersion mechanisms, namely, intermodal dispersion and intramodal dispersion
There is a third dispersion mechanism called polarization-mode dispersion, but it can usually be ignored in POFs [7]
Summary
Due to their flexibility and ease of use, poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) polymer optical fibers (POFs) have very interesting characteristics for short-haul communications links, as well as for other applications in fields such as optical sensing, illumination, and light amplification and lasing [1,2,3,4,5]. Interferometric techniques require precise knowledge of the mechanical components employed in the set-up because slight deviations in the physical dimensions of the interferometer produce significant discrepancies in the measurement results For this reason, the precision achievable with this method is very high in theory but not as high in practice, so the potential improvement in precision with respect to the other two methods is not so clear. There are only a few works that characterize the dispersive behavior of polymer fibers and, if they do, they get the values from the bulk material or from the fiber preform, instead of from the POF itself [16,17,18] These works usually require hand-made experimental measurements, apart from some time-consuming data analyses.
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