Fabrication of long period fiber gratings with CO2 laser fusion splicers

A few new methods for fabrication of long period fiber gratings (LPFG) using a CO
₂
laser fusion splicer are studied and discussed in the article. With the combination of fiber cladding shaping and thermal core expansion, the fabricated LPFG exhibit excellent performance as band pass filters. The insertion loss at 1550 nm band is below 0.5 dB. The entire process for fabricating such LPFGs is fully automated.