Abstract

We demonstrate a newly designed, to the best of our knowledge, hollow optical fiber coupler for a mid-infrared (IR) laser heterodyne spectrometer that mixes a targeted light source with local oscillator (LO) light. The hollow fiber achieves a high transmission efficiency ${\sim}{80 {-} 90}\;\% {\rm /m}$, not only for a coherent laser source but also for an incoherent blackbody source. The branching characteristics of the hollow optical fiber coupler are found to be strongly dependent on the curvature and length of the input port fiber, indicating that the branching ratio could be designed independently for each input port. Our laboratory measurements demonstrate that the branching ratio and transmittance of the coupler can be varied by coupling a flexible fiber to the input side owing to the excitation of higher-order modes. Using the hollow optical fiber coupler, a high-resolution emission spectrum of the quantum cascade laser at 10.3 µm for our ${{\rm CO}_2}$ laser-based heterodyne spectrometer is successfully achieved. Using a ${{\rm CO}_2}$ laser with a hollow fiber and a blackbody as a direct input signal in free space, we obtain the sensitivity performance of IR laser heterodyne spectrometer as 2000–3000 K of the system noise temperature. This suggests that the transmission of a coherent LO laser through a hollow optical fiber has almost the same sensitivity for the IR heterodyne detection as that without a fiber.

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