Digital measurements of propagation loss in optical organic polymer waveguides

摘要

Abstract: Many conventional methods to detect propagation losses in optical waveguides, such as Cut-Back Method and Prism-Sliding Method, are either destructive or inconvenient. Here we demonstrated a new method - CCD camera photographing method. A CCD camera was used to take digital photographs of the light streak in the waveguides and the scattered-light intensity distribution is recorded. After fitting the intensity distribution into an exponential attenuate curve, the propagation loss finally can be calculated from the attenuation coefficient of the curve. Compared with other detecting methods, it is more convenient and accurate. In our experiment, samples of polymer waveguides with propagation losses less than 0.5 dB/cm were fabricated. !6