Demonstration of opposing thermal sensitivities in hollow core fibers with open and sealed ends

Abstract

It has been shown that both the output phase and propagation time of an optical signal propagating through a length of hollow core optical fiber (HCF) drifts with changes in environmental temperature significantly less than in conventional optical fibers. In all earlier experimental studies, however, the simplifying assumption was made that the thermo-optic effect of air was negligible. In this paper we present the first experimental demonstration that the air inside a HCF core can make an appreciable contribution to the fiber’s thermal sensitivity with the performance depending whether the fiber is open to the atmosphere, or sealed at both ends (e.g. spliced to solid fiber pigtails as is quite often the case in practice). We measure both the sensitivity of the accumulated phase as well as the signal propagation time for both open and sealed HCF and show that these are opposite in sign. Most importantly we show that the thermal sensitivity contribution from the air inside an open HCF has the opposite sign to the effect of fiber elongation (which is otherwise the dominant effect responsible for the overall thermal sensitivity of HCF). We then go on to show that these two effects can be used to balance each other out in order to achieve zero thermal sensitivity for both accumulated phase and propagation time. We demonstrate this property experimentally over a large spectral range.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Radan Slavík: orcid.org/0000-0002-9336-4262

ORCID for Eric Numkam Fokoua: orcid.org/0000-0003-0873-911X

ORCID for Yong Chen: orcid.org/0000-0003-0383-6113

ORCID for Thomas Bradley: orcid.org/0000-0001-6568-5811

ORCID for Seyed Reza Sandoghchi: orcid.org/0000-0003-2196-3167

ORCID for Marco Petrovich: orcid.org/0000-0002-3905-5901

ORCID for Francesco Poletti: orcid.org/0000-0002-1000-3083

ORCID for David Richardson: orcid.org/0000-0002-7751-1058

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