We describe a silica hollow-core fiber for mid-infrared transmission with a minimum attenuation of 34 dB/km at 3050 nm wavelength. The design is based on the use of a negative curvature core wall. Similar fiber designed for longer wavelengths has a transmission band extending beyond 4 µm.

The background, optical properties, and applications of low-loss negative curvature hollow-core fiber are reviewed. Data on spectral attenuation are collated and extended.

Mid-infrared (IR) lasers are currently an area of rapid development, with several competing technologies. In traditional gas lasers, the effective interaction length is limited and the system as a whole is bulky and inflexible, limiting their applications. Standard gain fibers cannot be used in the mid-IR because the glass forming the fiber core is not transparent at these longer wavelengths. In this Letter, we report the demonstration of a mid-IR fiber gas laser using feedback in an optical cavity. The laser uses acetylene gas in a high-performance silica hollow-core fiber as the gain medium, and lases either continuous wave or synchronously pumped when pumped by telecom-wavelength diode lasers. We have demonstrated lasing on a number of transitions in the spectral band of 3.1–3.2 μm. The system could be extended to other selected molecular species to generate output in the spectral band up to 5 μm, and it has excellent potential for power scaling.

In this paper we discuss the limits of attenuation of silica hollow core negative curvature fibers in the wavelength range from 800 nm up to 4.5 µm. Both numerical and experimental results are presented and show good agreement. A minimum attenuation of 24.4 dB/km was measured at around 2400 nm wavelength, while 85dB/km was measured at 4000 nm.

We present high average power picosecond and nanosecond pulse delivery at 1030 nm and 1064 nm wavelengths respectively through a novel hollow-core Negative Curvature Fiber (NCF) for high-precision micro-machining applications. Picosecond pulses with an average power above 36 W and energies of 92 µJ, corresponding to a peak power density of 1.5 TWcm⁻² have been transmitted through the fiber without introducing any damage to the input and output fiber end-faces. High-energy nanosecond pulses (>1 mJ), which are ideal for micro-machining have been successfully delivered through the NCF with a coupling efficiency of 92%. Picosecond and nanosecond pulse delivery have been demonstrated in fiber-based laser micro-machining of fused silica, aluminum and titanium.

We study the mid-infrared attenuation of antiresonant hollow-core fiber made of fused silica glass. The role of absorptive losses increases with wavelength but can be minimized by reducing the overlap of the trapped light with the silica. We show that this overlap is least at the lowest-order antiresonance condition, corresponding to the thinnest core wall, and for higher resonances scales with the core wall thickness. A record-low minimum attenuation of 18 dB/km measured in our fiber at 3.1 µm wavelength is not limited by silica absorption. We measured 40 dB/km attenuation at 4 µm wavelength, where the attenuation of bulk silica is 860 dB/m. We show that this corresponds to a modal overlap of 2.81 × 10⁻⁵ which is in good agreement with simulations, suggesting that at this wavelength, attenuation is limited by silica absorption. This enables us to predict the achievable attenuation at longer wavelengths as well. Extrinsic losses due to gaseous molecular absorption may make demonstration of such losses difficult in some spectral bands. In contrast to shorter wavelengths, where leakage loss is the primary attenuation mechanism, introducing additional elements into the cladding design is unlikely to reduce the attenuation further, and further loss reduction would require a larger core size.