Optimized femtosecond laser direct-written fiber Bragg gratings with high reflectivity and low loss

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a femtosecond laser plane-by-plane (Pl-b-Pl) technology for inscription of high-quality fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs). The spherical aberration (SA) was introduced to elongate the focal volume, and then combined with the scanning process, an expanded rectangular refractive index modification (RIM) region can be achieved. Such RIM regions exhibit a length of 15 µm and a width of 14 µm. Note that it consists of a negative region and a positive region. We have systematically studied the influence of the overlap between the RIM region and fiber core on the spectrum of FBG. After optimizing, the core of a conventional single-mode fiber (SMF) is covered completely by using the positive RIM region, resulting in a significant enhancement of the coupling strength coefficient (i.e., 3177.6 m^-1). A 500 µm long FBG assembled by using these RIM regions can achieve a high reflectivity of 95.83%. Moreover, the cladding mode resonances in transmission spectrum are suppressed thoroughly, since the localized effect in RIM region was avoided. In addition, this FBG exhibits a high birefringence of 2.13 × 10^-4. Therefore, the proposed fabrication method can be used to inscribe high-quality FBGs that could be used in many fields such as communication, fiber laser, polarization-selective filtering and multi-parameter sensing.