Refractive index profile measurement of planar optical waveguides based on the near-field technique and digital holography

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• A new method is proposed to measure the refractive index profile of planar optical waveguides. • A measurement system is established by integrating the near-field setup and the modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer. • The refractive index profile is quantitatively obtained from two phase difference distributions. • The accuracy of the proposed method is up to 1 × 10 −3 . A method based on the near-field technique and digital holography is proposed to measure the refractive index profile of planar optical waveguides. A measurement system is established by integrating the near-field setup and the modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer. The near-field intensity profile of optical waveguides is recorded by CCD to get the primary refractive index profile. The primary phase difference distribution is calculated based on the relationship between the phase and refractive index. The digital hologram is acquired by the modified Mach-Zehnder interferometer to extract the real phase difference distribution using the hybrid reconstruction algorithm. According to the relationship between the primary and real phase difference distributions, the refractive index profile is quantitatively obtained. To evaluate the proposed method, we measured the refractive index profiles of multimode and single-mode fibers and compared with S14 based on refracted near-field method and SHR-1802 based on digital holography. The proposed method has a measurement accuracy of up to 1 × 10 -3 and is suitable for measuring the positive refractive index region of waveguides.