Where to Buy Hollow-core Fibers

Hollow core fibers are a unique solution enabling the delivery of ultrashort laser pulses (with femtosecond, picosecond or nanosecond duration) with extremely low attenuation and nearly no temporal and spectral distortion. The hollow core fibers can be used from the UV up to the mid-infrared.

Guiding Photonics fabricates hollow core fibers with a metallic reflective coating on the inner side of a hollow glass or plastic tube. For infrared transmitting fibers, there is also a dielectric layer with a thickness optimized for a specific wavelength range.

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UltraFast Innovations (UFI) offers hollow-core fibers which are suitable for compressing high-energy ultrashort pulses by nonlinear spectral broadening in a gas within the hollow core. Complete hollow-core fiber compressors are also available.

Optical signals in a hollow core photonic bandgap fiber are guided in an air core surrounded by a PBG microstructured region. In addition to the low bend sensitivity, this fiber design exhibits significantly reduced material nonlinearities since more than 95% of optical power is propagating in air. In addition, air/undoped silica provides excellent temperature immunity, which is critical for high performance fiber sensing and metrology applications.

Optical signals in a hollow core anti-resonant fiber propagate in an air core surrounded by a single ring of anti-resonant tube elements. Guidance is based on an anti-resonance from the thin glass membranes constituted by the non-touching tubes surrounding the hollow core. The extremely low overlap of guided power with the surrounding silica, less than 2 · 10⁻⁵, in addition to the large effective mode area, leads to a record-low optical nonlinearity.

Our Crystal Fiber portfolio of specialty fibers spans from nonlinear fibers optimized for octave spanning supercontinuum generation, over the World’s largest single mode ytterbium gain fibers for high power lasers and amplifiers, to advanced hollow core fibers guiding the light in air. Our single-mode LMA fibers are also available as patch cords with standard termination in our aeroGUIDE product range. Moreover, we offer the CONNECT broadband fiber delivery system, enabling easy and robust single mode coupling for fiber delivery at any wavelength – with the industry’s highest coupling efficiency.