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A broad review is given of microstructured fiber optics components - light guides, image guides, multicapillary arrays, and photonic crystal fibers - fabricated using the stack-and-draw method from various in-house synthesized oxide soft glasses at the Glass Department of the Institute of Electronic Materials Technology (ITME). The discussion covers fundamental aspects of stack-and-draw technology used at ITME, through design methods, soft glass material issues and parameters, to demonstration of representative examples of fabricated structures and an experimental characterization of their optical properties and results obtained in typical applications. Specifically, demonstrators include microstructured image guides providing resolution of up to 16000 pixels sized up to 20 μm in diameter, and various photonic crystal fibers (PCFs): index-guiding regular lattice air-hole PCFs, hollow core photonic bandgap PCFs, or specialty PCFs like highly birefringent microstructured fibers or highly nonlinear fibers for supercontinuum generation. The presented content is put into context of previous work in the area reported by the group of authors, as well as other research teams.

The nonlinear refractive index for 10 types of recently developed new soft glasses was measured under the same conditions using a pulsed Nd:YAG laser operating at 1064 nm with a 35 ps pulse duration. The study included various types of oxide-based soft glasses commonly used for nonlinear fiber optics, such as lead silicate, borosilicate, phosphatate, tellurite and heavy metal oxide glasses. All studied glasses have good rheological properties, and are suitable for further multi-step thermal processing, including fabrication of nonlinear photonic crystal fibers. As reference samples, standard fused silica glass and commercially available lead silicate glasses were used. The standard Z-scan setup was employed, with both “open-” and “closed-aperture” types of measurement. We show that nonlinearities of some benchmarked thermally stable heavy metal oxide glasses are comparable to more expensive and very fragile chalcogenide glasses.

Fiber lasers are a paradigm of dissipative systems, which distinguish themselves from a Hamilton system where energy is conservative. Consequently, pulses generated in a fiber laser are always accompanied by the continuous wave (CW). Under certain hypothesis, pulses generated in a fiber laser can be considered as a soliton, a product of a Hamilton system. Therefore, all the descriptions of solitons of a fiber laser are approximate. Coexistence of solitons and the CW from a fiber laser prevents unveiling of real nonlinear dynamics in fiber lasers, such as soliton interactions. Pulse behavior in a fiber laser can be represented by the state of single pulse, the state of period doubling of single pulse, the states of two pulses either tightly bound or loosely distributed, the states of three pulses, and various combinations of the above-mentioned states. Recently, soliton distillation was proposed and numerically demonstrated based on the nonlinear Fourier transform (NFT) [ J. Lightwave Technol. 39, 2542 (2021)JLTEDG0 733-8724 10.1109/JLT.2021.3051036 ]. Solitons can be separated from the coherent CW background. Therefore, it is feasible to isolate solitons from CW background in a fiber laser. Here, we applied the NFT to various pulses generated in a fiber laser, including single pulse, single pulse in period doubling, different double pulses, and multiple pulses. Furthermore, with the approach of soliton distillation, the corresponding pure solitons of those pulses are reconstructed. Simulation results suggest that the NFT can be used to identify soliton dynamics excluding CW influence in a fiber laser, which paves a new way for uncovering real soliton interaction in nonlinear systems.