Polymer optical fibers for photonics

Abstract

Polymer optical fibers may suitable for a wide variety of applications because they are easy to process into a wide variety of structures. For example, graded index fibers are widely believed to be ready for high bandwidth local area network applications such as fiber to the home. The polymer graded index fiber is inexpensive, easy to splice, and insensitive to small misalignment at a connector. Single mode polymer optical fibers, on the other hand, are promising candidates for all-optical devices because of the high light intensitities they can support, ability to tailor materials to meet a given application, and ease of fiber fabrication. In this paper, we review methods to make polymer fibers, discuss the fabrication process that is used to make graded-index fibers, single-mode polymer fibers and more complex fiber structures such as dual-core fibers. We also describe linear and nonlinear characterization techniques and review fiber properties. In particular, we discuss refractive index profile measurements in both graded index and step index fiber preforms, waveguiding studies in dual-core optical fibers, nonlinearity, and loss. We also introduce a new class of devices that are based on the photomechanical effect and discuss characterization studies and demonstration devices.