Multicore fibre technology: the road to multimode photonics

J. Bland-Hawthorn; Seong-Sik Min; Emma Lindley; Sergio Leon-Saval; Simon Ellis; Jon Lawrence; Nicolas Beyrand; Martin Roth; Hans-Gerd Löhmannsröben; Sylvain Veilleux

doi:10.1117/12.2231924

22 July 2016 Multicore fibre technology: the road to multimode photonics

J. Bland-Hawthorn, Seong-Sik Min, Emma Lindley, Sergio Leon-Saval, Simon Ellis, Jon Lawrence, Nicolas Beyrand, Martin Roth, Hans-Gerd Löhmannsröben, Sylvain Veilleux

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 9912, Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation II; 99121O (2016) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2231924
Event: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, 2016, Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Abstract

For the past forty years, optical fibres have found widespread use in ground-based and space-based instruments. In most applications, these fibres are used in conjunction with conventional optics to transport light. But photonics offers a huge range of optical manipulations beyond light transport that were rarely exploited before 2001. The fundamental obstacle to the broader use of photonics is the difficulty of achieving photonic action in a multimode fibre. The first step towards a general solution was the invention of the photonic lantern¹ in 2004 and the delivery of high-efficiency devices (< 1 dB loss) five years on². Multicore fibres (MCF), used in conjunction with lanterns, are now enabling an even bigger leap towards multimode photonics. Until recently, the single-moded cores in MCFs were not sufficiently uniform to achieve telecom (SMF-28) performance. Now that high-quality MCFs have been realized, we turn our attention to printing complex functions (e.g. Bragg gratings for OH suppression) into their N cores. Our first work in this direction used a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (near-field phase mask) but this approach was only adequate for N=7 MCFs as measured by the grating uniformity³. We have now built a Sagnac interferometer that gives a three-fold increase in the depth of field sufficient to print across N ≥ 127 cores. We achieved first light this year with our 500mW Sabre FRED laser. These are sophisticated and complex interferometers. We report on our progress to date and summarize our first-year goals which include multimode OH suppression fibres for the Anglo-Australian Telescope/PRAXIS instrument and the Discovery Channel Telescope/MOHSIS instrument under development at the University of Maryland.

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J. Bland-Hawthorn, Seong-Sik Min, Emma Lindley, Sergio Leon-Saval, Simon Ellis, Jon Lawrence, Nicolas Beyrand, Martin Roth, Hans-Gerd Löhmannsröben, and Sylvain Veilleux "Multicore fibre technology: the road to multimode photonics", Proc. SPIE 9912, Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation II, 99121O (22 July 2016); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2231924

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