Fiber Bragg gratings are used in astronomy for their ability to suppress narrow atmospheric emission lines of temporally varying brightness before the light is dispersed. These gratings can only operate in a single-mode fiber as the suppressed wavelength depends on mode velocity in the core. Recent experiments with fibers containing multiple single-moded cores have demonstrated the potential for inscribing identical gratings across all cores in a single pass. We have already improved the uniformity of gratings in 7-core fibers via modifications to the writing process; further progress can be achieved by tuning the gratings of the outer and inner cores relative to one another. Our eventual goal is to make the entire fiber suppress one wavelength to a depth of 30 dB or greater. By coating the fiber in a heat-conductive material with a high expansion coefficient, we can examine the effects of temperature and strain on the spectral response of each core. In this paper we present methods and results from experiments concerning the post-write tuning of gratings in multicore fibers.

Date Published: 22 July 2016
PDF: 7 pages
Proc. SPIE 9912, Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation II, 99121Z (22 July 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2234245

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9912:
Advances in Optical and Mechanical Technologies for Telescopes and Instrumentation II
Ramón Navarro; James H. Burge, Editor(s)