Polymer waveguide overlays for side-polished fiber devices.

Several polymers often used as hosts in guest-host organic thin-film systems were investigated for their suitability as overlays for side-polished fiber (SPF) devices. Good optical quality, ~10-mum-thick films were fabricated by spin coating and applied to SPF's by use of a decal deposition technique to produce passive devices such as channel-dropping (CD) filters, bandpass filters, and polarizers with good throughput and high contrast ratios. The main CD features can be quantitatively explained by a weak coupled-mode model.

Fabrication of a side-polished fiber polarizer with a biref ringent polymer overlay.

The fabrication of an in-line fiber polarizer consisting of a side-polished fiber (SPF) with a birefringent polymer thin-film overlay, polyvinyl carbazole, is described. Typical devices had <0.5 -dB insertion loss and extinction ratios of ~36 dB.

Formation of transverse spatial ring structures in increasing-absorption optical bistability.

We report the observation of transverse spatial ring structures in the transmitted beam profile using a thin CdS platelet that exhibits increasing-absorption optical bistability. The observed ring structure is in good agreement with our theoretical predictions.