Highly efficient optical add-drop filter with an angle-polished fiber coupler

TL;DR

This paper presents a highly efficient, tunable optical add-drop filter using an angle-polished fiber coupler with microbubble resonators, achieving high selectivity, a narrow linewidth, and effective frequency tuning for fiber-optic communications.

Contribution

It introduces an innovative angle-polished fiber coupler to selectively excite modes in microbubble resonators, improving add-drop filter performance and tunability.

Findings

Drop efficiency of 85.9%

Quality factor of 2 x 10^7

Tuning rate of 7.3 GHz/bar

Abstract

Microbubble whispering-gallery resonators have shown great promise in fiber-optic communications because of their low confinement loss and hollow cores, which allow for facile stress-based tunability. Usually, the transmission spectrum of taper-coupled microbubbles contains closely spaced modes due to the relatively large radii and oblate geometry of microbubbles. In this letter, we develop an optical add-drop filter using a microbubble coupled to fiber taper and angle-polished fiber waveguides. Because of the extra degree of freedom in the angle of its polish surface, the angle-polished fiber can be used for the discriminatory excitation of certain radial-order modes in the optical microcavity, reducing the high modal density and enhancing add-drop selectivity. Our robust and tunable add-drop filter demonstrated a drop efficiency of 85.9% and quality factor of 2 x 10^7, corresponding to a linewidth of 9.68 MHz. As a proof of concept, the drop frequency was tuned using internal aerostatic pressure at a rate of 7.3 +/- 0.2 GHz/bar with no diminishing effects on the add-drop filter performance.