A highly versatile optical fibre vacuum feed-through.

Coupling light into a vacuum system is a non-trivial problem, requiring the use of a specialized feed-through. This feed-through must be both leak tight and offer a low optical loss if it is to be suitable for general use. In this paper, we report on the development of an extremely simple yet versatile, low cost, demountable optical fiber vacuum feed-through based on the modification of a standard optical fiber bulkhead connector. The modified connector was found to have a leak rate of 6.6 ± 2.1 × 10(-6) mbar l/s and an optical loss of -0.41 ± 0.28 dB, making it suitable for use in high vacuum applications.