1. Field
The invention is related to methods for making fiber axicon tapers with fusion splicers, and more particularly to making fiber axicon with arc fusion splicer and making axicon with CO2 laser fiber processor.
2. Related Art
The increasing demands of semiconductor lasers and optoelectronic devices require an increasingly larger number of fiber lenses for coupling fibers to the electronic chips and circuits. Among many different fiber lens designs, such as ball shaped, wedge shaped, etc., the axicon shaped fiber lens is still the most widely used design in optoelectronic devices.
Currently, the axicon fiber lens is mainly manufactured using two methods, polishing and laser shaping. With the polishing method, the minimum spot size that can be achieved without introducing significant aberrations is 3.5 micron, which is not small enough to efficiently couple to a large number of laser types and optoelectronic devices. Though the laser shaping method can reach as low as 2 micron spot size, the Gaussian distributed intensity of laser beams cannot easily achieve good centration with the fiber cladding. Thus, the laser shaping method is not ideal for V-grove arrays, where a precise spacing between adjacent tapers is essential.