BATH, U.K. -- BlazePhotonics today announced three new hollow core products designed for operating wavelengths around 440 nm, 570 nm and 800 nm. At the heart of the development of these fibers lies a new process that makes it possible to fabricate small scale photonic crystal fiber structures with unprecedented precision.
This process allows us, for the first time, to create photonic bandgap guiding hollow core fibers for the visible part of the spectrum: Two of the new fibers offered by BlazePhotonics are designed for yellow (570 nm) and blue (440 nm) light. Together with the fibers for red and green wavelengths launched in December, BlazePhotonics’off-the-shelf hollow core fibers now cover the entire visible spectrum.
The new process is also used to fabricate larger scale fibers with a significantly lower level of structural distortion than was previously possible, resulting in improved mode quality and lower attenuation. BlazePhotonics employs this new process to offer a new 7-cell core hollow PCF for wavelengths around 800 nm, designed for the delivery of powerful ultra-short pulses from Ti:Sapphire lasers. This fiber can significantly improve the performance of the beam delivery system particularly for applications where it is important to focus the laser beam on as small a spot as possible.
In a separate release:
BlazePhotonics announces a hollow core photonic bandgap fiber with a record loss of 1.7 dB/km near 1550 nm wavelength. This represents more than a seven-fold improvement over the best previously reported value and is an important step towards making hollow-core fiber a practical proposition for long-haul transmission.
BlazePhotonics has developed a hollow core photonic bandgap fiber with an attenuation of 1.7 dB/km at 1560-1575 nm wavelength. The mode size and mode profile of the fiber is comparable to that of SMF 28. Lengths of several kilometers were fabricated and loss and other key optical parameters showed excellent homogeneity over length. This breakthrough was achieved by carefully controlling the cross sectional profile of the waveguide in order to minimize the amount of light that is in contact with the many air/glass interfaces in the fiber, a key contributor to loss in hollow core bandgap fibers.
BlazePhotonics’ CEO Simon Haslam comments: “Perhaps the most exciting potential application for hollow core photonic crystal fiber is for it to become the next generation of ultra-low loss, ultra low non-linearity transmission fiber. This work has brought us one important step closer to that goal”.
BlazePhotonics Ltd.