Automated testing of optical fibres: towards the design of the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer Fibre Transmission System

TL;DR

This paper describes the development of an automated optical fibre test bench and software for characterizing fibres for the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer, demonstrating its effectiveness compared to manual testing methods.

Contribution

It introduces an automated testing system and open-source software for fibre characterization, improving efficiency and consistency in testing thousands of fibres.

Findings

Automated test bench achieves comparable results to manual testing.

Candidate fibres meet the < 5% FRD requirement at f=2.

Open-source software facilitates fibre testing automation.

Abstract

We present the results of an automated fibre optic test bench constructed at the University of Victoria as part of the Maunakea Spectroscopic Explorer (MSE) Fibre Transmission System (FiTS). In preparation for MSE-FiTS, we have begun characterizing the focal ratio degradation (FRD) of candidate multi-mode fibres with the ultimate goal of testing all ~4000 MSE fibres. To achieve this, we have built an optical bench to perform an automated version of the collimated beam test. Herein we present the design of the bench and discuss the automation of components by introducing the Big FiTS Fibre Wrapper (Big FFW), our open-source automation software. We conclude with the results of tests performed using the Big FFW on a sample of candidate fibre, comparing the Big FFW results against those found using manual methods. Our results suggest that the candidate MSE fibre meets the science requirement of < 5% FRD at f=2 and less than 1% disagreement between both measurement methods.