Near-infrared optical image transport through an all-solid tellurite optical glass rod with transversely-disordered...

For the first time, an all-solid tellurite optical glass rod with a transversely disordered refractive index profile was fabricated successfully as a medium to study the transverse localization of light and near-infrared (NIR) optical image transport. Two tellurite glass compositions of 70TeO₂-8Li₂O-17WO₃-3MoO₃-2Nb₂O₅ (TLWMN) and 75TeO₂-15ZnO-5Na₂O-5La₂O₃ (TZNL) which have a small difference in softening temperature (about 0.5 °C), compatible thermal expansions from room to 400 °C and broad transmission range from about 0.4 up to 6.0 µm were developed for a successful fabrication process. The tellurite transversely disordered optical rod (TDOR) consists of high and low-index units (TLWMN and TZNL, respectively). The diameter of each unit is 1.0 μm and their refractive index difference was about 0.095 at 1.55 µm. Experimental results showed that after a CW probe beam at 1.55 μm propagated in a 10-cm-long tellurite TDOR, the beam became localized. In addition, NIR optical images at 1.55 μm of numbers on a test target were transported. The captured images at the output facet of the tellurite TDOR are visually clear with high contrast and high brightness. The quality of our transported optical images can be comparable or higher than the results which were obtained by a polymer Anderson localized fiber and by a commercially available multicore imaging optical fiber.