Reflowed solgel spherical microlens for high-efficiency optical coupling between a laser diode and a single-mode fiber

摘要

To improve the coupling efficiency between a laser diode and a single-mode fiber, we propose a two-microlens coupling scheme that uses two solgel spherical microlenses for high coupling efficiency. The conventional reflow technique was employed and extended to the inorganie-organic hybrid SiO_(2)/ZrO_(2) solgel material to form the microlenses. Preliminary results show that the coupling efficiency was increased to -1.28 dB (74.5%) by the proposed scheme, compared with a coupling efficiency of -10.13 dB (9.7%) by the butt-joint method. The proposed fabrication technique demonstrates that use of a reflowed solgel spherical microlens is a cost-effective mass-production approach to application of micro-optical elements in optical communication.