Technical Papers and Presentations

Conventional polarization maintaining fiber is constructed using a pair of borosilicate rods on either side of the fiber core. Current manufacturing processes prohibit the construction of fibers with the required accuracy needed for applications requiring precision birefringence. Through the use of COMSOL, this paper describes simulated results of fiber with a mutually orthogonal secondary set of capillary tubes filled with liquid ethanol. The results show that it is possible to “tune” the birefringence in these fibers over a limited range depending on the temperature at which the ethanol is loaded into the capillaries. Over this tuning range the thermal sensitivity of the birefringence is an order-of-magnitude lower than conventional fibers, making this technique well suited for applications requiring precision, thermally insensative birefringence in optical fibers.