Hybrid fabricating of silica micro/nanofibers

Abstract

We report a hybrid two-step approach for fabricating silica micro/nanofibers with different diameters (the minimum one down to 180 nm). Due to tapering and etching techniques introduced to this approach, the time is reduced from hundreds of minutes to several minutes to manufacture silica nanofibers by etching and the complexity of tapering mechanical system is brought down, because this approach has the ability to control the micro/nanofiber diameter on a nanometer-scale. Uniform nanofibers with losses as low as 0.05 dB/mm at 1.55 μm wavelength are obtained suggesting the advantage of the hybrid approach to build up micro/nanofiber-based devices, especially in locally changing the structure of micro/nanofiber.

Keywords

nano-fabrication / micro/nanofiber / sub-wavelength-diameter fiber / nanophotonics

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank Prof. Hongwei Han and Dr. Xiong Li for their help to carry out chemical experiments and express gratitude to Dr. Qingzhong Huang, Dr. Qiang Zhang and Dr. Cui Qing for their helpful discussion. The project was supported by University Basic Operating Foundation from Central Government by Graduates’ Innovation Fund of Huazhong University of Science and Technology (No. HF-08-04-2011-230).

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg