Abstract: Chiral fiber gratings are produced in a microforming process in which optical fibers with noncircular or nonconcentric cores are twisted as they pass though a miniature oven. Periodic glass structures as stable as the glass material itself are produced with helical pitch that ranges from under a micron to hundreds of microns. The geometry of the fiber cross section determines the symmetry of the resulting structure which in turn determines its polarization selectivity. Single helix structures are polarization insensitive while double helix gratings interact only with a single optical polarization. Both single and double helix gratings may act as a fiber long period grating, coupling the core and cladding modes. The coupling is manifested in a series of narrow dips in the transmission spectrum. The dip position is sensitive to fiber elongation, twist and temperature, and to the refractive index of the surrounding medium. The suitability of chiral gratings for sensing pressure, temperature and liquid levels is investigated. Polarization insensitive single helix silica glass gratings display excellent stability up to temperatures of 6000C, while a pressure sensor with dynamic range of nearly 40 dB is demonstrated in polarization selective double helix gratings.

Abstract: A critical challenge for the convergence of optics and electronics is that the micrometre scale of optics is significantly larger than the nanometre scale of modern electronic devices. In the conversion from photons to electrons by photodetectors, this size incompatibility often leads to substantial penalties in power dissipation, area, latency and noise. A photodetector can be made smaller by using a subwavelength active region; however, this can result in very low responsivity because of the diffraction limit of the light. Here we exploit the idea of a half-wave Hertz dipole antenna (length approx 380 nm) from radio waves, but at near-infrared wavelengths (length approx 1.3 microm), to concentrate radiation into a nanometre-scale germanium photodetector. This gives a polarization contrast of a factor of 20 in the resulting photocurrent in the subwavelength germanium element, which has an active volume of 0.00072 microm3, a size that is two orders of magnitude smaller than previously demonstrated detectors at such wavelengths.