Asymmetric Transmission Spectrum of a Long-Period Fiber Grating and Its Removal Using a Beam Scanning Method

Tae-Jung EOM
Young-Jae KIM
Youngjoo CHUNG
Won-Taek HAN
Un-Chul PAEK
Byeong Ha LEE

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Electronics   Vol.E84-C    No.5    pp.615-620
Publication Date: 2001/05/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (Joint Special Issue on Recent Progress in Optoelectronics and Communications)
Category: Optical Fibers and Cables
Keyword: 
fiber grating,  long-period fiber grating,  chirped grating,  band-rejection filter,  WDM communication system,  

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Summary: 
In an ideal fiber grating having a uniform refractive index modulation, the reflection or the transmission spectrum is symmetric with equal amount of side lobes on both sides of the resonant wavelength of the fiber grating. It is observed that a long-period fiber grating made by a non-uniform UV laser beam through a uniform amplitude mask has an asymmetric transmission spectrum. The asymmetric characteristic is explained with Mach-Zehnder effect in the long-period fiber grating. The non-uniform UV laser beam makes also a non-uniform index modulation along the fiber core. Therefore, a beam coupled to a cladding mode at a section of the grating can be re-coupled to the core mode after passing a certain distance. The re-coupled beam makes Mach-Zehnder-like interference with the un-coupled core mode. However, it is presented that the asymmetric phenomenon can be overcome by scanning the UV laser beam along the fiber over the mask. The beam scanning method is able to suffer the same fluence of the UV laser beam on the fiber. Finally, a linearly chirped long-period fiber grating was made using the non-uniform UV laser beam. Due to the asymmetricity the chirping effect was not clearly observed. It is also presented that the beam scanning method could remove the asymmetric problem and recover the typical spectrum of the linearly chirped fiber grating.