Research on the traceability of absolute optical fiber power to cryogenic radiometer

Abstract

Optical fiber power is an important physical quantity for optical fiber communication measurement. Currently, the absolute optical fiber power is traceable to absolute radiometer, such as electrically calibrated radiometer, and cryogenic radiometer. For optical fiber power transfer, the primary standard of NIM is the cryogenic radiometer that has an uncertainty of 2 parts in 104. Because most cryogenic radiometers are designed to be used with collimated beams rather than divergent beams from an optical fiber; therefore transfer standards should be well designed for optical power measurement using the beam geometry correction. We designed a trap detector using for optical fiber power transfer. One can omit the beam geometry correction from an optical fiber using his design. We present a fiber power measurement using a planar detector compared with this trap detector, which are traceable to the primary standard (cryogenic radiometer). The difference between the comparison shows that the trap detector is suitable for absolute fiber power measurement, meanwhile optical fiber power transfer using planar detectors should be corrected when transferred from cryogenic radiometer.