While single mode silica/silica fibers are available from a number of suppliers with standard polymer coatings, Fiberguide is unique in offering these fibers with high performance buffers/coatings of aluminum, gold or polyimide. A single mode fiber has a sufficiently small core diameter that it can only transmit a single transverse optical mode. Typical core diameters are in the range of several microns up to around 10 microns depending on the wavelength being transmitted. Conventional single mode fibers covered in this data sheet have circularly symmetric cores. As such, they can actually transmit two orthogonally polarized modes. Normally, this aspect is ignored because such orthogonal modes travel at nearly the same velocity and they can be treated as one. However, in very high data rate systems and other critical applications it is important to preserve the polarization state that is launched into the fiber. Such cases require the use of polarization preserving single mode fibers that are discussed in the accompanying data sheet.

FEATURES

• Concerning fiber lasers and amplifiers, single mode guidance allows achieving a high beam quality of the output.

• Relating to optical fiber communications systems, single mode guidance avoids the problem of modal dispersion, which, in multimode fibers, would limit the transmission bandwidth.

• In connection with measurement setups, one often relies on the fact that the output of a single-mode fiber has a fixed spatial shape, independent of the launch conditions.

APPLICATIONS

• Optical sensor systems

• Severe temperature environments

• Oil and gas applications

• Imaging catheters and other medical devices

• Instrumentation

• Device pigtailing

• Light delivery

• WDM fused couplers

• Tap couplers

• Photonic devices

• Tight coils and integrated modules