Modal and Propagation Studies of Photonic Lanterns

The “photonic lantern,” is an optical fiber device, that has emerged from the field of astrophotonics, it allows for a single-mode photonic function to take place within a multimode fiber. The fan-out and fan-in(fig 1.a) configurations were later found to have immense applications in the emerging frontiers of optical fiber communication like Space-Division multiplexing and Mode-Division multiplexing. We present our study of the modal behavior as well as propagation characteristics of such devices, with an objective to understand the important design parameters and their effects on its functionalities. Here, we present three different studies that we performed on these devices.