No Arabic abstract
We review our recent progress in the production and characterization of tapered optical fibers with a sub-wavelength diameter waist. Such fibers exhibit a pronounced evanescent field and are therefore a useful tool for highly sensitive evanescent wave spectroscopy of adsorbates on the fiber waist or of the medium surrounding. We use a carefully designed flame pulling process that allows us to realize preset fiber diameter profiles. In order to determine the waist diameter and to verify the fiber profile, we employ scanning electron microscope measurements and a novel accurate in situ optical method based on harmonic generation. We use our fibers for linear and non-linear absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy of surface-adsorbed organic molecules and investigate their agglomeration dynamics. Furthermore, we apply our spectroscopic method to quantum dots on the surface of the fiber waist and to caesium vapor surrounding the fiber. Finally, towards dispersive measurements, we present our first results on building and testing a single-fiber bi-modal interferometer.
We present a procedure for reproducibly fabricating ultrahigh transmission optical nanofibers (530 nm diameter and 84 mm stretch) with single-mode transmissions of 99.95 $ pm$ 0.02%, which represents a loss from tapering of 2.6 $,times ,$ 10$^{-5}$ dB/mm when normalized to the entire stretch. When controllably launching the next family of higher-order modes on a fiber with 195 mm stretch, we achieve a transmission of 97.8 $pm$ 2.8%, which has a loss from tapering of 5.0 $,times ,$ 10$^{-4}$ dB/mm when normalized to the entire stretch. Our pulling and transfer procedures allow us to fabricate optical nanofibers that transmit more than 400 mW in high vacuum conditions. These results, published as parameters in our previous work, present an improvement of two orders of magnitude less loss for the fundamental mode and an increase in transmission of more than 300% for higher-order modes, when following the protocols detailed in this paper. We extract from the transmission during the pull, the only reported spectrogram of a fundamental mode launch that does not include excitation to asymmetric modes; in stark contrast to a pull in which our cleaning protocol is not followed. These results depend critically on the pre-pull cleanliness and when properly following our pulling protocols are in excellent agreement with simulations.
We study the cross-sectional profiles and spatial distributions of the fields in guided normal modes of two coupled parallel optical nanofibers. We show that the distributions of the components of the field in a guided normal mode of two identical nanofibers are either symmetric or antisymmetric with respect to the radial principal axis and the tangential principal axis in the cross-sectional plane of the fibers. The symmetry of the magnetic field components with respect to the principal axes is opposite to that of the electric field components. We show that, in the case of even $mathcal{E}_z$-cosine modes, the electric intensity distribution is dominant in the area between the fibers, with a saddle point at the two-fiber center. Meanwhile, in the case of odd $mathcal{E}_z$-sine modes, the electric intensity distribution at the two-fiber center attains a local minimum of exactly zero. We find that the differences between the results of the coupled mode theory and the exact mode theory are large when the fiber separation distance is small and either the fiber radius is small or the light wavelength is large. We show that, in the case where the two nanofibers are not identical, the intensity distribution is symmetric about the radial principal axis and asymmetric about the tangential principal axis.
Small composite objects, known as Janus particles, drive sustained scientific interest primarily targeted at biomedical applications, where such objects act as micro- or nanoscale actuators, carriers, or imaging agents. The major practical challenge is to develop effective methods for manipulation of Janus particles. The available long-range methods mostly rely on chemical reactions or thermal gradients, therefore having mediocre precision and strong dependency on the content and properties of the carrier fluid. To tackle these limitations, we propose the manipulation of Janus particles (here, silica microspheres half-coated with gold) by optical forces in the evanescent field of an optical nanofiber. We find that Janus particles exhibit stronger transverse localization and faster propulsion compared to all-dielectric particles of the same size. The propulsion speed recorded for a 3-$mu$m particle with a 20-nm-thick gold cap averages at 2~$mu$m/s per 1~mW of optical power, reaching 133 body length/s at 200~mW going through the nanofiber.
We investigate trapping geometries for cold, neutral atoms that can be created in the evanescent field of a tapered optical fibre by combining the fundamental mode with one of the next lowest possible modes, namely the HE21 mode. Counter propagating red-detuned HE21 modes are combined with a blue-detuned HE11 fundamental mode to form a potential in the shape of four intertwined spirals. By changing the polar- ization from circular to linear in each of the two counter-propagating HE21 modes simultaneously the 4-helix configuration can be transformed into a lattice configuration. The modification to the 4-helix configuration due to unwanted excitation of the the T E01 and T M01 modes is also discussed.
We show that the optical force field in optical tweezers with elliptically polarized beams has the opposite handedness for a wide range of particle sizes and for the most common configurations. Our method is based on the direct observation of the particle equilibrium position under the effect of a transverse Stokes drag force, and its rotation around the optical axis by the mechanical effect of the optical torque. We find overall agreement with theory, with no fitting, provided that astigmatism, which is characterized separately, is included in the theoretical description. Our work opens the way for characterization of the trapping parameters, such as the microsphere complex refractive index and the astigmatism of the optical system, from measurements of the microsphere rotation angle.