Vincent Michaud-Belleau publishes in Optica
Vincent Michaud-Belleau, PhD student in Jérôme Genest's team, is the first author of an article published in the prestigious journal Optica. Entitled Backscattering in antiresonant hollow-core fibers: over 40 dB lower than in standard optical fibers, the article reports on work carried out by Vincent at the University of Southampton in the laboratory of Professor Radan Slavik, a COPL alumnus who carried out a postdoctoral fellowship from 2000 to 2003 under the direction of Sophie LaRochelle.
The attenuation of anti-resonant fibers, a key indicator in many applications, is rapidly approaching the best in "standard" (silica) fibers. Reducing attenuation involves optimizing design and manufacturing. Vincent's demonstration helps on both fronts: from a design point of view, the results provide information on the level of diffusion losses, which could help to better balance the different sources of losses in future versions. From a manufacturing point of view, the reflectometer he built is able to measure imperfections in a relatively simple (and non-destructive) way, which can give clues as to what needs to be improved, in addition to instruments already existing.
Moreover, backscatter is a limiting factor in several applications: fiber gyroscopes, reflective sensors, bidirectional fiber links, etc. The work carried out by Vincent shows that this fiber has (in all likelihood) the smallest backscatter coefficient ever measured, in addition to other rather interesting properties. It could therefore lead to considerable improvements in these applications.