Divide and conquer: an efficient solution to highly multimoded photonic lanterns from multicore fibres

• Published in: Optics express Vol. 25; no. 15; pp. 17530 - 17540
• Main Authors: Leon-Saval, Sergio G, Betters, Christopher H, Salazar-Gil, Joel R, Min, Seong-Sik, Gris-Sanchez, Itandehui, Birks, Tim A, Lawrence, Jon, Haynes, Roger, Haynes, Dionne, Roth, Martin, Veilleux, Sylvain, Bland-Hawthorn, Joss
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 24.07.2017
• ISSN: 1094-4087; 1094-4087
• DOI: 10.1364/OE.25.017530

Photonic lanterns typically allow for single-mode action in a multimode fibre. Since their invention over a decade ago for applications in astrophotonics, they have found important uses in diverse fields of applied science. To date, large aperture highly-mulitmoded to single-mode lanterns have been difficult as fabrication techniques are not practical for mass replication. Here as a proof of concept, we demonstrate three different devices based on multicore fibre photonic lanterns with: 100µm core diameters; NAs = 0.16 and 0.15; and requiring 259 single-mode core system, specifically 7 multicore fibres each with 37 cores, instead of 259 individual single-mode fibres. The average insertion loss excluding coupling efficiencies is only 0.4dB (>91% transmission). This concept has numerous advantages, in particular, (i) it is a direct scaleable solution, (ii) eases imprinting of photonic functions, e.g. fibre Bragg gratings; and (iii) new approach for large-area optical fibre slicers for future large-aperture telescopes.