Abstract
The possibility to combine silica photonic crystal fiber (PCF) as low-loss platform with advanced functional materials, offers an enormous range of choices for the development of fiber-based tunable devices. Here, we report a tunable hybrid silica PCF with integrated As2S3 glass nanolayers inside the air-capillaries of the fiber based on a solution-processed glass approach. The deposited high-index layers revealed antiresonant transmission windows from ~500 nm up to ~1300 nm. We experimentally demonstrate for the first time the possibility to thermally-tune the revealed antiresonances by taking advantage the high thermo-optic coefficient of the solution-processed nanolayers. Two different hybrid fiber structures, with core diameter 10 and 5 μm, were developed and characterized using a supercontinuum source. The maximum sensitivity was measured to be as high as 3.6 nm/°C at 1300 nm. The proposed fiber device could potentially constitute an efficient route towards realization of monolithic tunable fiber filters or sensing elements.
Highlights
Solution-processed chalcogenide glasses were first investigated by Chern et al.[28]
After the preparation of the nanocolloidal As2S3 chalcogenide glass solution in ethylenediamine (EDA), the low-viscosity material was infiltrated in both PCFs using the capillaries forces at room temperature
In order to verify the presence of the formed glass, Energy Dispersive X-ray (EDX) spectroscopy was applied for element analysis
Summary
Solution-processed chalcogenide glasses were first investigated by Chern et al.[28] Nowadays, this method has attracted increasing interests in the optics community, mainly for different applications such as chemical sensors, data storage devices, lenses and infrared detectors[29,30,31,32]. The solution-processed approach of chalcogenide glass has discrete advantages over other deposition techniques such as simple preparation procedure, deposition of thin or thick films on complex and non-planar structures, integration among different optical devices, etc.[30]. This method can be adopted for any chalcogenide glass composition and can be expanded to any solution-dissolved material or even for stacked multi-material layer deposition. We show that the high thermo-optic coefficient (∆n/∆T ) of the chalcogenide films allows the tuning of the transmission band red-edges as high as ~170 nm over 48 °C
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