King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals

Electrical Engineering Department

Subwavelength-diameter optical fibres (SDFs)

Ahmad Suhail Salim
EE 633: Optical Fiber Communications
Abstract Interest in subwavelength-diameter optical fibre
(SDF or SDOF) has been remarkably growing. These fibres have
diameters smaller than the wavelength of the transmitted light
which essential for the future generation of photonic devices.
Many techniques have been proposed to fabricate these fibres by
using a wide range of bottom-up techniques such as chemical or
physical vapor deposition and top-down processes such as fibre
drawing. In this paper we briefly introduce SDFs with spotting
the light on their features, applications, and fabrication.

I. INTRODUCTION
Many names have been used in the literature to refer to the
SDFs, some of these are photonic nanowires, optical fibre
nanowires (OFNs), submicron-diameter silica fibres, ultra-thin
optical fibres, etc. We will use these names interchangeably.
Prior to 2003 only two attempts to manufacture
submicrometer wires by using a top-down process were
reported in the literature [1]. Interest in OFNs has been limited
mainly because of the perceived difficulties in manufacturing
suitably low-loss structures. Although several SDFs were
fabricated by using a variety of bottom-up methods, all of
them exhibited an irregular profile and a surface roughness
that appear to have limited the loss levels that could be
reliably achieved [1]. In 2003 a two-step process to fabricate
low-loss submicrometric silica wires was presented [2]; it
involved wrapping and drawing a pretapered section of
standard fibre around a heated sapphire tip. Although the
measured loss was orders of magnitude higher than that
achieved later with flame-brushing techniques [3], it was low
enough to allow the use of SDFs for optical devices and gains
researchers interest in the technology.
The remainder of this report is organized as follows. In
section II, the fabrication methodologies of SDFs are
discussed. Section III presents the features of SDFs, followed
by the applications of SDFs in section IV. Section V
illustrates the constraints on the taper length. Section VI draws
the reports conclusions.
II. FABRICATION
In the past few years, three different methodologies have
been used to fabricate SDFs from optical fibres:
A. Tapering the fibre by pulling it around a sapphire rod
heated by a flame
B. The flame-brushing technique
C. The modified flame-brushing technique
We will explain the first technique in this report. Special
pulling machines are used for it. An optical fibre usually
consists of a core, a cladding and a protective coating. Before
pulling a fibre, its coating is removed (the fibre is stripped).

EE 633: Optical Fiber Communications

Then the fibre is fixed at two ends on the movable translation

stages of the pulling machine. The middle of the fibre between
the stages is then heated with a flame or a laser beam and at
the same time the translation stages move in the opposite
directions [2,4]. The glass melts and the fibre is elongated so
that its diameter decreases as shown in Fig 1.

Fig. 1 Schematic diagram of drawing a wire from a micrometrediameter silica wire wound around the tip of a sapphire taper.

The flame or laser beam usually moves in order to obtain

waist of significant length and constant thickness. The
resulting structure comprises a narrow stretched filament (the
taper waist of 1-10 mm in length and diameter down to
100 nm), each end is linked to an unstretched fibre by a
conical section (the taper transition region), as shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2 Optical fibre taper.

III. FEATURES
SDFs are of interest for a range of emerging fibre optic
applications, since they offer a number of enabling optical and
mechanical properties, including the following:
1. Strong confinement. Light can be confined to a very
small area over long device lengths, allowing the ready
observation of nonlinear interactions.
2. High power in the evanescent field. A considerable
fraction of the power can propagate in the evanescent field
outside the SDF physical boundary.
3. Great configurability. As shown in Fig 3, these fibres do
not break when bent and/or twisted, indicating that they have
excellent flexibility and mechanical properties [2].

4. Low-loss connection. Low-loss connection to other

optical fibres and fibreized components is possible; since
SDFs are manufactured by adiabatically stretching optical
fibres, they maintain the original fibre size at their input and
output, allowing ready splicing to standard fibres and
fibreized components. Insertion losses smaller than 0.1dB are
commonly observed.

Assignment Report 2009/2010 (092)

King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals

5. SDFs can be fabricated with very good uniformity of
diameter and surface smoothness compared to submicrometre- or
nanometre-width wires, strips or other structures obtained by
earlier developed fabrication methods [2].

Fig. 3 (scanning electron microscope (SEM) images)

a, A 15-mm diameter micro-ring made by 520-nm-diameter SDF
b, Two twisted 330-nm-diameter wires.

IV. APPLICATIONS
Applications of SDFs can be classified into three main
groups according to what property they exploit:
1. Evanescent field
2. Confinement
3. Transition regions
Evanescent field applications harnesses the power propagating
outside the physical boundary of the wire and include high-Q
knot, loop, and coil resonators, particle manipulation [1], and
chemical and bio-sensing in liquid media [2].
Applications exploiting the confinement properties of SDFs
include supercontinuum generation, particle trapping, and
nonlinear switching [1].
On the other hand, transition regions have been exploited to
convert and filter modes [1]. Fig 4 represents an idealized
SDF for higher-order mode filtering, If the conical transition
tapers are adiabatic, guided modes in the core of the
multimode fibre (LP01, LP11 in Fig. 1(a)) are continuously
mode converted to guided cladding modes in the SDF on a
one-to-one basis by the down-taper and are then coupled back
into guided modes in the multimode fibre by the up-taper.
However, higher-order modes can be effectively suppressed
by controlling the SDF diameter in the uniform waist region.
In addition to that, SDFs might be used for the next
generation of computer processing. Also, SDFs are suitable
for applications where tight waveguide bends are desired due
to their mechanical flexibility [2].

Electrical Engineering Department

V. CONSTRAINTS ON THE TAPER LENGTH
Creating an optical fibre nanowire involves heating and
drawing a section of a larger-diameter fibre to create a section
of nanofibre having a taper at one or both ends (depending on
application). Knowledge essential for proper design includes
not just the mode intensity profiles in and around the
nanofibre but also the efficiency of the light transfer from the
section of larger-diameter fibre through the taper and into the
nanofibre. The researchers calculated this for various
situations, based on a previously developed criterion [5].
The researchers determined the taper length required for an
adiabatic (lossless) transmission of light as shown in Fig 5.
They phrased their results in terms of the ratio of the
nanofibre diameter to the light wavelength (); as a
consequence, the results are useful at other wavelengths as
well.
For a diameter equal to 0.6 or more, the taper length need
only be 10 m for adiabatic coupling, while for a diameter of
0.29, the taper should be about 1 mm long. For a diameter of
0.16, however, the required minimum taper length for true
adiabatic coupling is an enormous 1 km.

Fig. 4 Adiabatic (lossless) coupling from a standard optical fibre into a

nanofibre is achieved only if the taper length is above a certain minimum.

VI. CONCLUSIONS
In this report, the characteristics of subwavelength-diameter
optical fibre were investigated. the features that these fibres
can give shows that these fibres will be promising components
in the future photonic devices to provide various applications.
REFERENCES
[1]

[2]
[3]
[4]
Fig. 4 (a) Non-filtered taper (b) Filtered taper
[5]

EE 633: Optical Fiber Communications

Brambilla et al., Optical fibre nanowires and microwires: fabrication

and applications, Advances in Optics and Photonics, Vol. 1, Issue 1,
pp.
107-161
(2009)
[Online].
Available:
http://www.opticsinfobase.org/DirectPDFAccess/C0FB626F-BDB9137E-CE797CEFD6EFAA4C_176227/107-fulltext.xhtml.
Tong et al., Subwavelength-diamter silica wires for low-loss optical
wave guiding, Nature 426, 816 (2003)
G. Brambilla, V. Finazzi, and D. J. Richardson, Ultra-low-loss optical
fibre nanotapers, Opt. Express 12, 22582263 (2004).
Subwavelength-diameter-optical-fibre,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subwavelengthdiameter_optical_fibre#cite_note-2
Alexander Hartung et al., Opt. Express 18, 3754 (2010).

Assignment Report 2009/2010 (092)