Infrared (IR) fibers offer a versatile approach to guiding and manipulating light in the IR spectrum, which is becoming increasingly more prominent in a variety of scientific disciplines and technological applications. Despite well-established efforts on the fabrication of IR fibers in past decades, a number of remarkable breakthroughs have recently rejuvenated the field—just as related areas in IR optical technology are reaching maturation. In this review, we describe both the history and recent developments in the design and fabrication of IR fibers, including IR glass and single-crystal fibers, multimaterial fibers, and fibers that exploit the transparency window of traditional crystalline semiconductors. This interdisciplinary review will be of interest to researchers in optics and photonics, materials science, and electrical engineering.

Porous fibers have been identified as a means of achieving low losses, low dispersion and high birefringence among THz polymer fibers. By exploiting optical fiber fabrication techniques, two types of THz polymer porous fibers—spider-web and rectangular porous fibers— with 57% and 65% porosity have been fabricated. The effective refractive index measured by terahertz time domain spectroscopy shows a good agreement between the theoretical and experimental results indicating a lower dispersion for THz porous fiber compared to THz microwires. A birefringence of 0.012 at 0.65 THz is also reported for rectangular porous fiber.

We report a significant advance in preform extrusion and die design, which has allowed for the first time the fabrication of complex structured preforms using soft glass and polymer billets. Structural preform distortions are minimized by adjustment of the material flow within the die. The low propagation loss of an extruded complex bismuth glass fiber demonstrates the potential of this advanced extrusion technique for the fabrication of novel soft glass and polymer microstructured fiber designs.