Optical Microfibers: Fundamentals and Applications

The interest in optical microfibers has been recently renewed [1-14] giving rise to the development of microfiber photonics. Very low-loss optical microfibers are usually fabricated by tapering the conventional silica optical fibers [1,2,4,11]. Microfiber photonics uses microfibers as building blocks for the fabrication of optical devices. It is feasible that, eventually, the microfibers can be assembled into complex multi-functional low-loss photonic circuits. At present, the simplest devices composed of microfibers have been demonstrated experimentally and/or considered theoretically. This paper reviews several theoretical and experimental results on optical microfibers and microfiberbased devices, concentrating on the results obtained at OFS Laboratories. Primarily, the linear transmission properties of single mode optical microfibers and their applications are considered.

The ideal optical single mode microfiber (MF) is straight, uniform, and cylindrically symmetric. For such a microfiber, the Maxwell equations are separable and the linear theory is well developed [15,16].