Fabrication of Microchannels in a Nodeless Antiresonant Hollow-Core Fiber Using Femtosecond Laser Pulses
Paweł Kozioł,
Piotr Jaworski,
Karol Krzempek,
Viktoria Hoppe,
Grzegorz Dudzik,
Fei Yu,
Dakun Wu,
Meisong Liao,
Jonathan Knight,
Krzysztof Abramski
Affiliations
Paweł Kozioł
Laser & Fiber Electronics Group, Faculty of Electronics, Photonics and Microsystems, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, 50-370 Wroclaw, Poland
Piotr Jaworski
Laser & Fiber Electronics Group, Faculty of Electronics, Photonics and Microsystems, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, 50-370 Wroclaw, Poland
Karol Krzempek
Laser & Fiber Electronics Group, Faculty of Electronics, Photonics and Microsystems, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, 50-370 Wroclaw, Poland
Viktoria Hoppe
Centre for Advanced Manufacturing Technologies (CAMT), Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, 50-370 Wroclaw, Poland
Grzegorz Dudzik
Laser & Fiber Electronics Group, Faculty of Electronics, Photonics and Microsystems, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, 50-370 Wroclaw, Poland
Fei Yu
Key Laboratory of Materials for High Power Laser, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201800, China
Dakun Wu
Key Laboratory of Materials for High Power Laser, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201800, China
Meisong Liao
Key Laboratory of Materials for High Power Laser, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 201800, China
Jonathan Knight
Centre for Photonics and Photonic Materials, Department of Physics, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK
Krzysztof Abramski
Laser & Fiber Electronics Group, Faculty of Electronics, Photonics and Microsystems, Wroclaw University of Science and Technology, 50-370 Wroclaw, Poland
In this work, we present femtosecond laser cutting of microchannels in a nodeless antiresonant hollow-core fiber (ARHCF). Due to its ability to guide light in an air core combined with exceptional light-guiding properties, an ARHCF with a relatively non-complex structure has a high application potential for laser-based gas detection. To improve the gas flow into the fiber core, a series of 250 × 30 µm microchannels were reproducibly fabricated in the outer cladding of the ARHCF directly above the gap between the cladding capillaries using a femtosecond laser. The execution time of a single lateral cut for optimal process parameters was 7 min. It has been experimentally shown that the implementation of 25 microchannels introduces low transmission losses of 0.17 dB (<0.01 dB per single microchannel). The flexibility of the process in terms of the length of the performed microchannel was experimentally demonstrated, which confirms the usefulness of the proposed method. Furthermore, the performed experiments have indicated that the maximum bending radius for the ARHCF, with the processed 100 µm long microchannel that did not introduce its breaking, is 15 cm.