PNNL

Abstract

Chalcogenide fibers display a wide transmission window ranging from 2-10.6 ?m, ideally suited to the development of passive and active mid-infrared (MIR) sensors. They are essential building blocks for the integration and miniaturization of laser-based MIR optical systems for terrestrial, airborne and space-based sensing platforms. Single-mode chalcogenide fibers have only recently become commercially available and therefore performance data and standard reproducible processing techniques have not been widely reported. In this paper we present a method for producing high quality facets on commercial single-mode As-Se fibers with core and cladding diameters of 28.1 and 169.9?m respectively. The emitted beam profile from these fibers, using the 9.4?m line of a tunable CO2 laser, showed the presence of leaky cladding modes due to waveguiding conditions created by the protective acrylate jacket. These undesirable cladding modes were easily suppressed by applying a gallium coating on the cladding near both input and output facets. We provide experimental data of efficient mode suppression and the emission of a circular near-perfect Gaussian beam profile from the fiber. A model to determine appropriate placement of gallium coatings to minimize processing while maximizing cladding mode suppression is currently underway. Furthermore, analyses of the beam, acquired by scanning an HgCdTe detector, yielded a 1/e2 numerical aperture of 0.11 with a full width half maximum divergence of 11° for these fibers. The availability of single-mode MIR fibers, in conjunction with recent advances in room temperature quantum cascade lasers (QCL), could provide compact and light-weight transmitter solutions for several critical defense and nuclear non-proliferation needs.