Abstract

Several years ago, representatives of the Telecommunications Industry Association, an industry trade organization, approached NIST to inquire whether we could help them develop a standard of optical-fiber diameter that would be accurate within 0.1 μm. This paper reports the development of that standard¹ and of two related standards, a steel gage wire for estimating the inside diameters of ferrules and a standard for measuring outside diameters of ferrules. Specifically, we have developed three devices, a contact micrometer, a scanning confocal microscope, and a white-light interference microscope, that are capable of absolute measurements with uncertainty around 40 nm.

© 1995 Optical Society of America