Development of soft glass structured optical fibers based on 3D preform printing

We report on the use of 3D soft-glass printing for the fabrication of preforms for air-glass and all-glass structured optical fibers. A horizontal, line-by-line printing approach was implemented to replace the traditional 'stack-and-draw' technique. As a proof of concept, we fabricated a set of air-glass and all-glass structured optical fibers using in-house synthesized heavy-metal oxide, silicate, and tellurite glasses. Basic optical properties of the fibers, including attenuation, dispersion, and modal characteristics, were measured and analyzed. We further demonstrate the performance of a highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber featuring flat dispersion in the infrared range above 1.5 μm, and a zero-dispersion wavelength at 1.7 μm. An octave-spanning supercontinuum from 1.1 μm to 2.2 μm was generated by pumping a 22cm section of the printed fiber in the anomalous dispersion regime using 100 fs pulses at 1550nm from a standard off-the-shelf femtosecond fiber laser.