Heat-and-pull rig for fiber taper fabrication
Citation
The article is cited as: Ward, J. M., O’Shea, D. G., Shortt, B. J., Morrissey, M. J., Deasy, K., & Nic Chormaic, S. G. (2006). A heat-and-pull rig for fiber taper fabrication. Optics Express, 14(8), 3432–3440.
Keywords
- Fiber taper fabrication
- Heat-and-pull rig
- CO2 laser
- Adiabatic tapers
- Microresonators
- Bottle resonators
- Evanescent coupling
- Microspherical cavities
- Optical fiber sensing
- Transmission loss
- Taper profile
- Adiabaticity criterion
Brief
The article focuses on a method of creating microscopic tapers in optical fibers for use in various optical applications.
Summary
This article describes a method for fabricating small-diameter (3-4 µm) fiber optic tapers. The authors use a CO2 laser to heat the fiber and a stepper motor to scan the laser beam across the fiber as it is being pulled. This heat-and-pull technique can be used to create adiabatic tapers, which have low transmission losses. The authors also demonstrate the fabrication of bottle resonators, a type of optical microcavity, using this method.
The authors argue that using a stepper motor to scan the laser beam is a simpler and more cost-effective method than using the more traditional galvanometer scanners. The stepper motor also allows for precise control over the length of the taper and the resonator. The authors report that their method produces tapers with low transmission losses (0.3 ± 0.2 dB at 980 nm), which are suitable for applications such as micro-resonator coupling.