Karbasi Salman, Frazier Ryan J, Mirr Craig R, Koch Karl W, Mafi Arash
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
J Vis Exp. 2013 Jul 29(77):50679. doi: 10.3791/50679.
We develop and characterize a disordered polymer optical fiber that uses transverse Anderson localization as a novel waveguiding mechanism. The developed polymer optical fiber is composed of 80,000 strands of poly (methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) and polystyrene (PS) that are randomly mixed and drawn into a square cross section optical fiber with a side width of 250 μm. Initially, each strand is 200 μm in diameter and 8-inches long. During the mixing process of the original fiber strands, the fibers cross over each other; however, a large draw ratio guarantees that the refractive index profile is invariant along the length of the fiber for several tens of centimeters. The large refractive index difference of 0.1 between the disordered sites results in a small localized beam radius that is comparable to the beam radius of conventional optical fibers. The input light is launched from a standard single mode optical fiber using the butt-coupling method and the near-field output beam from the disordered fiber is imaged using a 40X objective and a CCD camera. The output beam diameter agrees well with the expected results from the numerical simulations. The disordered optical fiber presented in this work is the first device-level implementation of 2D Anderson localization, and can potentially be used for image transport and short-haul optical communication systems.
我们开发并表征了一种无序聚合物光纤，该光纤采用横向安德森局域化作为一种新型的波导机制。所开发的聚合物光纤由80,000股聚甲基丙烯酸甲酯（PMMA）和聚苯乙烯（PS）随机混合而成，并拉制成边长为250μm的方形横截面光纤。最初，每股的直径为200μm，长度为8英寸。在原始纤维股的混合过程中，纤维相互交叉；然而，大的拉伸比保证了在几十厘米的光纤长度上折射率分布不变。无序位点之间0.1的大折射率差导致了与传统光纤的光束半径相当的小局域光束半径。输入光使用对接耦合方法从标准单模光纤发射，无序光纤的近场输出光束使用40倍物镜和CCD相机成像。输出光束直径与数值模拟的预期结果吻合良好。本文中提出的无序光纤是二维安德森局域化在器件层面的首次实现，并有可能用于图像传输和短距离光通信系统。
