Photonic Lantern for Material Processing with Spatial Light Control

Optical fiber technology has been crucial in an array of fields, from telecommunications to medical applications and beyond. However, the need to combine light from multiple fibers into a single optic fiber or output has presented a significant challenge, primarily because of power constraints and high losses encountered with traditional methods. Current methods of merging light at lower powers into higher-power beams often involve intricate and highly precision-based mechanisms, which are hard to implement and maintain. Existing approaches also struggle to seamlessly switch light from one output to another, leading to inefficiencies. Furthermore, such methods have been found wanting in effective and simultaneous amplification of beams, especially when involving high power levels.

Technology Description

A photonic lantern is a sophisticated technology that combines light from several fibers or fiber cores into one or more fibers or fiber cores. The common use of a photonic lantern  is to merge several low-power beams into a single high-power beam. Additionally, photonic lanterns have the capability to couple light from multicore fibers into single-mode, multimode, or other types of multicore fibers. This capability is achieved by modulating the phases of the input beams, allowing the light to be switched from one output to another like output cores of a multicore output fiber. What differentiates a photonic lantern is its ability to not just couple but also amplify the beams by using an active fiber in or coupled to the photonic lantern. This process involves coupling signal light and pump light into the core and the cladding of an active multimode or multicore fiber. The active multimode or multicore fiber then couples the amplified signal light into output fiber(s) via another photonic lantern.