Nondestructive measurement of the roughness of the inner surface of hollow core-photonic bandgap fibers.
We present optical and atomic force microscopy measurements of the roughness of the core wall surface within a hollow core photonic bandgap fiber (HC-PBGF) over the [3×10-2μm-1-30  μm-1] spatial frequency range. A recently developed immersion optical profilometry technique with picometer-scale sensitivity was used to measure the roughness of air-glass surfaces inside the fiber at unprecedentedly low spatial frequencies, which are known to have the highest impact on HC-PBGF scattering loss and, thus, determine their loss limit. Optical access to the inner surface of the core was obtained by the selective filling of the cladding holes with index matching liquid using techniques borrowed from micro-fluidics. Both measurement techniques reveal ultralow roughness levels exhibiting a 1/f spectral power density dependency characteristic of frozen surface capillary waves over a broad spatial frequency range. However, a deviation from this behavior at low spatial frequencies was observed for the first time, to the best of our knowledge.
Xavier
X
Buet
Coralie
C
Brun
Jérôme
J
Gâteau
Bruno
B
Bresson
Seyed Reza
SR
Sandoghchi
Eric Numkam
EN
Fokoua
Marco
M
Petrovich
Francesco
F
Poletti
David
D
Richardson
Damien
D
Vandembroucq
Gilles
G
Tessier