Bend losses in polyurethane fibers

Happy to announce that the first experimental paper from our revamped Sydney Terahertz Lab has been published in Optics Express.

Our talented Denison Student Jonathan Skelton had the opportunity to study the world-famous polyurethane fibers of our friend and colleague Alessio Stefani during the summer earlier this year, way back when Sydney was not in lockdown mode. To enable this, we built a fast terahertz 2D imaging setup based on our fiber-coupled Menlo Systems TERAK15. This system makes it very easy to study bend losses in waveguides.

We took a close look at bend losses in two hollow core THz fibers, which are really flexible despite being quite thick. It’s not common to be able to bend terahertz waveguides of this size by this much, and it was interesting to weigh the pros and cons of these kinds of structures. What we learned: in terms of bend losses, these simple tubes are not so bad, unless you bend them a lot. Vice versa: structured tubes are better if you the fibers a lot! Otherwise, you couple to tube cladding modes…