Single-mode helical Bragg grating waveguide created in a multimode coreless fiber by femtosecond laser direct writing
Jun He, Jia He, Xizhen Xu, Bin Du, Baijie Xu, Changrui Liao, Zhiyong Bai, Yiping Wang
Abstract
We demonstrate the fabrication of single-mode helical Bragg grating waveguides (HBGWs) in a multimode coreless fiber by using a femtosecond laser direct writing technique. This approach provides a single-step method for creating Bragg grating waveguides. Specifically, the unique helical structure in such an HBGW serves as a depressed cladding waveguide and also generates strong Bragg resonance due to its periodicity. Effects of pulse energy, helical diameter, and helical pitch used for fabricating HBGWs were studied, and a single-mode HBGW with a narrow bandwidth of 0.43 nm and a Bragg wavelength of 1546.50 nm was achieved by using appropriate parameters, including a diameter of 10 μm and a helical pitch of 1.07 μm. The measured cross-sectional refractive index profile indicates that a depressed cladding waveguide has been created in this single-mode HBGW. Moreover, five single-mode HBGWs with various Bragg wavelengths were successfully fabricated by controlling the helical pitch, and this technique could be used for achieving a wavelength-division-multiplexed HBGW array. Then, the temperature and strain responses of the fabricated single-mode HBGW were tested, exhibiting a temperature sensitivity of 11.65 pm/°C and a strain sensitivity of 1.29 pm/με, respectively. In addition, the thermal stability of the single-mode HBGW was also studied by annealing at a high temperature of 700°C for 15 h. The degeneration of the single-mode waveguide into a multimode waveguide was observed during the isothermal annealing process, and the peak reflection and the Bragg wavelength of the fundamental mode exhibited a decrease of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" display="inline" id="m1"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mo form="prefix">∼</mml:mo> <mml:mn>7</mml:mn> <mml:mtext> </mml:mtext> <mml:mi>dB</mml:mi> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> and a “blue” shift of 0.36 nm. Hence, such a femtosecond laser directly written single-mode HBGW could be used in many applications, such as sapphire fiber sensors, photonic integrated circuits, and monolithic waveguide lasers.