February 2011
Spotlight Summary by Juan Diego Ania Castañón
Fabrication, characterization, and theoretical analysis of controlled disorder in the core of optical fibers
Recent demonstrations of coherent and incoherent random lasing in optical fibers have drawn attention to the possibilities offered by this medium for the generation of random lasing. The paper by Puente et al. further advances the field by presenting a theoretical and experimental study of the possibility of inducing random variations of the diffractive index of an optical fiber with a controlled degree of disorder. Moreover, the authors show that by controlling this disorder they are able to affect the properties of the transmitted light in the fiber, suppressing radiative losses and improving the coupling between modes, making the waveguide particularly suitable for efficient random lasing.
The timeliness of the work is undisputable, and even though the match between theory and experiment is not perfect, the twofold theoretical–experimental approach paints a more complete physical picture of the method applied, making it particularly useful to other researchers on the field.
All in all, the results presented in this paper open up new and important possibilities in the design of coherent and incoherent random fiber lasers and can be expected to have a significant impact in the community.
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Article Information
Fabrication, characterization, and theoretical analysis of controlled disorder in the core of optical fibers
Norma P. Puente, Elena I. Chaikina, Sumudu Herath, and Alexey Yamilov
Appl. Opt. 50(6) 802-810 (2011) View: Abstract | HTML | PDF