Fiber Endface Sealing Technique for Optical Connection of Holey Fibers with Low Loss and Reflection

摘要

We propose a new fiber endface sealing technique for the optical connection of holey fibers (HFs). We experimentally investigate the optimum sealing condition for physical contact using a carbon dioxide (CO_2) laser. We use this technique to fabricate an HF connector, and achieve low splice loss and a high return loss when splicing with a conventional SMF connector. With hole-assisted fiber (HAF), the obtained splice and return losses are almost the same as those obtained with the conventional method. In particular, with photonic crystal fiber (PCF), we obtained a minimum splice loss of 0.2 dB and a return loss exceeding 50 dB at wavelengths of 1.31 and 1.55 μm.