Development and Assessment of a Lensed Fiber for Applications in Integrated Photonics

Fiber-based optical devices are becoming increasingly important in different fields, such as signal transmission systems, environmental sensing, metal cutting, and medicine. Fiber lenses are receiving much attention in these cases due to their many applications. This technology has been present for more than two decades, since mainstream optical fiber adoption, and has been evolving. Currently, there are various lensed fibers commercially available on the market. However, this still presents many challenges and complications. With the development of advanced integrated photonics devices, the demand for certain types of lensed fibers has increased, and compatibility could be better. In this paper, we are demonstrating the manufacturing of working lensed fibers in a laboratory environment from the standard telecommunication optical single-mode fiber (SMF) using a fiber arc fusion splicer to make cost-effective, well-performing lensed fibers with potentially good compatibility with integrated photonics devices.