Researchers have shown that 3D laser printing can be used to fabricate a high-quality, complex polymer optical device directly on the end of an optical fiber. This type of micro-optical device—which has details smaller than the diameter of a human hair—could provide an extremely compact and inexpensive way to tailor light beams for a variety of applications.
“Communication technologies, the internet and many other applications are based on optical fibers,” said research team leader Shlomi Lightman from Soreq Nuclear Research Center in Israel. “When light comes out of the fiber, large bulky optical elements are typically used to route it to the next location. Our approach minimizes both the size and cost for this process by integrating the routing process into the fiber itself.”
In the journal Optics Letters, Lightman and colleagues describe how they fabricated the tiny multi-component beam shaper directly onto a fiber. The device turns normal laser light into a twisted Bessel beam that carries orbital angular momentum and doesn’t expand in space like typical light beams.
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