Recently, spectral measurement becomes an important tool in astronomy to find exoplanets etc. The fibers are used to transfer light from the focal plate to spectrometers. To get high-resolution spectrum, the input slits of the spectrometers should be as narrow as possible. In opposite, the light spots from the fibers are circle, which diameters are clearly wider than the width of the spectrometer slits. To reduce the energy loss of the fiber-guide star light, many kinds of image slicers were designed and fabricated to transform light spot from circle to linear. Some different setup of fiber slicers are introduced by different research groups around the world. The photonic lanterns are candidates of fiber slicers. Photonic lantern includes three parts: inserted fibers, preform or tubing, taped part of the preform or tubing. Usually the optical fields concentrate in the former-core area, so the light spots are not uniform from the tapered end of the lantern. We designed, fabricated and tested a special kind of photonic lantern. The special fibers consist polymer cladding and doped high-index core. The polymer cladding could be easily removed using acetone bath, while the fiber core remains in good condition. We inserted the pure high-index cores into a pure silica tubing and tapered it. During the tapering process, the gaps between the inserted fibers disappeared. Finally we can get a uniform tapered multimode fiber end. The simulation results show that the longer the taper is, the lower the loss is. The shape of the taper should be controlled carefully. A large-zone moving-flame taper machine was fabricated to make the special photonic lantern. Three samples of photonic lanterns were fabricated and tested. The lanterns with cladding-removable fibers guide light uniform in the tapered ends that means these lanterns could collect more light from those ends.

Date Published: 7 August 2014
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 9151, Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation, 91514C (7 August 2014); doi: 10.1117/12.2055780

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9151:
Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation
Ramón Navarro; Colin R. Cunningham; Allison A. Barto, Editor(s)