Investigation into the power-law dependence of fibre Bragg grating growth

We have undertaken a detailed experimental and numerical investigation of fibre Bragg grating growth rates over relatively long timescales, in which we consider the influence of zero-order UV irradiation, jitter and drift. In contrast to other studies, our results show that measurements of grating growth dynamics are in good agreement with numerical expressions describing exponential decay of a population of defect sites if the influence of small lateral displacements between the optical fibre and the modulated UV beam (jitter) are accounted for.