Silica glass optical fibers have revolutionized data transmission, sensing and laser development over the past 50 years. Moreover, dielectric waveguides with a hollow core offer exciting development possibilities beyond traditional technology. Hollow Core Optical Fibers (HCFs) have been fabricated over the past 20 years with various geometries and refinements, yet their attenuation has remained significantly higher than can be routinely achieved in standard silica single mode fibers. Here we present recent developments in Nested Anti-resonant Nodeless Fiber (NANF) design over the last few years and show how this rapidly developing technology has been refined to produce state of the art HCFs at wavelengths between 850 – 1625 nm.
KEYWORDS: Reflectors, Acoustics, Sensing systems, Signal attenuation, Data acquisition, Spatial resolution, Distance measurement, Sensors, Structural health monitoring, Time metrology
The detection range of Distributed Acoustic Sensor (DAS) systems is limited by signal attenuation to approximately 75 km. The ability to increase the detection range is of great commercial interest to the offshore wind farm operators interested in structural health monitoring of their subsea cables. In most cases, the operators are interested in monitoring 200km~400km subsea cable where the fibres can be accessed at two ends of the cable. In this paper, we present a new, commercially viable, ultra low-loss sensing element, comprising of discrete broadband reflectors. Optical time domain reflectometry measurements were performed on a 100 m sample of the fibre. The sample contained reflectors placed at 3 m intervals. At reflector sites, the recorded trace revealed increases in the backscatter signal two hundred times that of the unmodified regions of the fibre. Theoretically, the spatial resolution of a system utilising this new element is only restricted by the ability to resolve two reflector points. Therefore, the ultra low loss fibre also offers the potential for high spatial resolution measurements over large distances, as long as sufficient data acquisition and processing techniques are employed. The significant enhancement means no amplification of the reflected signal is required, further reducing the cost of the system. To verify the long distance capability of the fibre, the sample was subjected to optical side scattering radiometry measurements. The largest side-scattered loss from a reflector point was 10^-4 dB per reflector. If a reflector was placed every meter, the total fibre attenuation is predicted to be 0.3 dB per km.
We have demonstrated Raman frequency conversion and supercontinuum light generation in a hollow core Kagomé fiber filled with air at atmospheric pressure, and developed a numerical model able to explain the results with good accuracy. A solid-state disk laser was used to launch short pulses (~6ps) at 1030nm into an in-house fabricated hollow core Kagomé fiber with negative core curvature and both ends were open to the atmosphere. The fiber had a 150 THz wide transmission window and a record low loss of ~12 dB/km at the pump wavelength. By gradually increasing the pulse energy up to 250 μJ, we observed the onset of different Kerr and Raman based optical nonlinear processes, resulting in a supercontinuum spanning from 850 to 1600 nm at maximum input power. In order to study the pulse propagation dynamics of the experiment, we used a generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equation (GNLSE). Our simulations showed that the use of a conventional damping oscillator model for the time-dependent response of the rotational Raman component of air was not accurate enough at such high intensities and large pulse widths. Therefore, we adopted a semiquantum Raman model for air, which included the full rotational and vibrational response, and their temperature-induced broadening. With this, our GNLSE results matched well the experimental data, which allowed us to clearly identify the nonlinear phenomena involved in the process. Aside from the technological interest in the high spectral density of the supercontinuum demonstrated, the validated numerical model can provide a valuable optimization tool for gas based nonlinear processes in air-filled fibers.
We study in detail the macrobending effects in a wide transmission bandwidth (~200nm) 19 cell hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber operating at 1550nm. Our results indicate low bend sensitivity over a ~130nm wide interval within the transmission window, with negligible loss (<0.1dB) for bending radii down to 5mm. The “red shift” and “blue shift” of the bandgap edge have been observed at the short and long wavelength edges, respectively. The cutoff wavelengths where air-guiding modes stop guiding can be extracted from the bending loss spectra, which matches well with the simulated effective refractive index map of such fiber.
While hollow core-photonic crystal fibres are now a well-established fibre technology, the majority of work on these speciality fibres has been on designs with a single core for optical guidance. In this paper we present the first dual hollow-core anti-resonant fibres (DHC-ARFs). The fibres have high structural uniformity and low loss (minimum loss of 0.5 dB/m in the low loss guidance window) and demonstrate regimes of both inter-core coupling and zero coupling, dependent on the wavelength of operation, input polarisation, core separation and bend radius. In a DHC-ARF with a core separation of 4.3 μm, we find that with an optimised input polarisation up to 65% of the light guided in the launch core can be coupled into the second core, opening up applications in power delivery, gas sensing and quantum optics.
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