Metallic attenuated total reflection infrared hollow fibers for robust optical transmission systems

摘要

A durable metallic attenuated total reflection (ATR) hollow fiber (bore size: 1.45 mm, wall thickness: 50 μm) was designed and fabricated based on a nickel capillary tube and hexagonal germanium dioxide (GeO_2). The anomalous dispersion of the hexagonal GeO_2 layer grown inside a nickel tube achieves low-loss light transmission at two peak-power wavelengths for CO_2 laser devices (10.2 and 10.6 μm). An 11-28 W, 10.2 or 10.6 μm CO_2 laser power was steadily delivered via a fiber elastically bent from 0° to 90° (radius: 45 cm) for over 40 min (transmission loss: 0.22 to 4.2 dB/m). Theoretically fitting the measured temperatures showed that front-end clipping caused greater thermal loading than the distributed mode absorption. The maximum external temperature of a nickel ATR fiber is much lower than that of a silica glass ATR fiber owing to their different heat dissipation abilities. The HE_(11) mode purity of the output beam profiles decreased from 90.3% to 44.7% as the bending angle increased from 0° to 90°. Large core sizes and wall roughnesses (scattering loss 0.04 dB/m) contributed to mode mixing and excess losses that were above the value predicted by the classical Marcatili and Schmeltzer equation (0.024-0.037 dB/m).