Tunable photonic crystal fiber coupler based on a side-polishing technique

A tunable photonic crystal fiber (PCF) coupler, which couples part of the optical power in one PCF with that in another PCF, has been made by side polishing. We fabricated the PCF coupler by mating two side-polished PCFs. We achieved evanescent field coupling between the core modes of the two PCFs by using side polishing to bring the cores close to each other. By adjusting the mating angle between the two side-polished PCFs we obtained as much as 90% tunability in the coupling ratio. The spectrum of the coupling ratio was almost flat, with small ripples, over a 400-nm wavelength range.