Polarization properties of an optical fiber biconical taper with a liquid crystal cladding

摘要

Tapering technique is one of the most useful in the telecommunications as well as in sensing which offers up to now thebest quality fused optical fiber elements such as couplers, splitters and combiners. It allows to fabricate various types ofthe tapers used as platforms of optical fiber transducers for chemical or biological sensors, as well. In the paperpolarization properties of an optical biconical taper with liquid crystal cladding are presented. The optical fiber tapermanufactured by mentioned above technique was sandwiched between parallel glass plates with ITO and alignmentlayers to form a tested optical element. Standard nematic liquid crystals E7 and 6CHBT were applied as claddings of thetapered fiber. Sufficient transmission losses of infrared radiation were observed when orientation layers of glass plateswere perpendicular to the tapered fiber. The main contribution of this paper is calculation the polarization properties ofthe tested samples by the Lu-Chipman decomposition method based on measured Mueller matrices. Analysis ofmeasurements show that the applied voltages have the strongest influence on transmission losses and dichroism. Theseeffects will be carefully investigated towards the voltage sensor and emulators of polarization depended loss.