Effect of incident light beam conditions on firing characteristics of the radial-firing optical fiber tip

Abstract

Effect of the incident light beam conditions, such as the beam profile, the beam size, and the incident angle on the beam propagation and the firing characteristics of the radial-firing optical fiber tip comprised of conically shaped air pocket was investigated by the simulation using the ray-tracing method. Regardless of the different Gaussian profiles of the incident beam, no significant difference in the maximum firing angle but a little increase in the firing power was found with the increase of the axial distance of the Gaussian profile. With the increase of the incident beam size, no significant difference in the maximum firing angle was found but the relative firing power decreased and the extent of the power decrease depended on the numerical aperture (NA) of the fiber. On the other hand, the incident beam angle (BA) dependence of the firing power was significant, decreased to 65.9% and 31.9% for the RFF tip of NA 0.12 and NA 0.22, respectively, with the increase of the incident BA from 0 deg to 12 deg but the maximum firing angles did not show much decrease, smaller than 5 deg. The present modified simulation considering the incident light beam size and angle clearly showed the very close power distribution of the firing beam with respect to the firing angle obtained by the experimental results.