Optical fibers that are being used in computing, telecommunications and optical lab instrument can be quite expensive due to its fabrication costs. Since these optical fibers are often an integral part of these equipment, scientists sought a way of making them cheaper without necessarily sacrificing quality. The process they discovered has allowed manufacturers to speed up the production of hollow-core optical fibers from about a week to just a single day.

The new, cost effective optical fibers have been put to the test to see if they can stand up to the quality and performance that optical fibers are meant to deliver. Initial test results prove that the new and cheaper optical fiber is better or is just as good in almost every aspect known to optical fibers. This is quite important in respect to the development of new technologies that are being produced to enhance the standard equipment that are part of our everyday lives, like optical lab instrument used in research laboratories, cellular phones and microscopes. The range of hollow core fiber technology extends not only to telecommunications, but to laser machining and a more cost-effective generation of x-ray of ultra violet light that is being used in surgical and biomedical optics in hospitals today.

Professor Jonathan Knight from the Centre for Photonics & Photonic Materials in the Department of Physics at the University of Bath , states that this discovery is a big improvement of hollow core fiber technology. He explains that in standard optical fibers, light has to travel in small cylindrical cores of glass that run down the length of the fiber. This may cause some limitations and affect the way the fiber optics performs. The glass allows for some pulses of light to spread out and these results in a blurry effect, hindering the full potential of use when it comes to telecommunications and medical imaging equipment. Therefore, the hollow core fibers hold great potential for the next generation optical fibers. The performance of the fibers is enhanced in so many ways.

With all experiments and discoveries, there are the advantages and the disadvantages. Although the benefits of the hollow core fibers far outweigh the disadvantages, there is one problem that the researchers must not ignore. When developing the hollow core fibers, the problem is that only a special sort of optical fiber will be able to guide light down the hollowed out air hole. The design calls for a two dimensional pattern of minute air holes in the glass around the core itself to trap the light. Because of this, the fibers have been difficult to fabricate and can only perform in limited wavelengths.

So the researchers at Bath experimented on ways to overcome this. By narrowing the wall of glass around the central hole by just a hundred nanometers, or about a 10 millionth of a meter, the wavelengths of the performance of the optical fiber can be enhanced. The new and improved optical fiber was part of a European Commission-funded Framework 6 project ‘NextGenPCF’, initially for gas sensing applications. But since the fiber is so superior, it can be applied to range of specialty field such as in optical lab instruments, spectroscopy, biomedical and surgical optics and even the automotive and space industries. Read more on this topic