Fabrication and Applications of Microfiber

Abstract

Microfibers have attracted growing interest recently especially in their fabrication methods and applications. This is due to a number of interesting optical properties of these devices, which can be used to develop low-cost, miniaturized and all-fiber based optical devices for various applications (Bilodeau et al., 1988; Birks and Li, 1992 ). For instance, many research efforts have focused on the development of microfiber based optical resonators that can serve as optical filters, which have many potential applications in optical communication and sensors. Of late, many microfiber structures have been reported such as microfiber loop resonator (MLR), microfiber coil resonator (MCR), microfiber knot resonator (MKR), reef knot microfiber resonator as an add/drop filter and etc. These devices are very sensitive to a change in the surrounding refractive index due to the large evanescent field that propagates outside the microfiber and thus they can find many applications in various optical sensors. The nonlinear properties of the micro/nanostructure inside the fiber can also be applied in fiber laser applications. This chapter thoroughly describes on the fabrication of microfibers and its structures such as MLR, MCR and MKR. A variety of applications of these structures will also be presented in this chapter.