Fabrication and THz loss measurements of porous subwavelength fibers using a directional coupler method

We report several strategies for the fabrication of porous subwavelength fibers using low density Polyethylene plastic for low-loss terahertz light transmission applications. We also characterize transmission losses of the fabricated fibers in terahertz using a novel non-destructive directional coupler method. Within this method a second fiber is translated along the length of the test fiber to probe the power attenuation of a guided mode. The method is especially suitable for measuring transmission losses through short fiber segments, a situation in which standard cutback method is especially difficult to perform. We demonstrate experimentally that introduction of porosity into a subwavelength rod fiber, further reduces its transmission loss by as much as a factor of 10. The lowest fiber loss measured in this work is 0.01 cm(-1) and it is exhibited by the 40% porous subwavelength fiber of diameter 380 microm. For comparison, the loss of a rod-in-the-air subwavelength fiber of a similar diameter was measured to be approximately 0.1 cm(-1), while the bulk loss of a PE plastic used in the fabrication of such fibers is >or= 1 cm(-1). Finally, we present theoretical studies of the optical properties of individual subwavelength fibers and a directional coupler. From these studies we conclude that coupler setup studied in this paper also acts as a low pass filter with a cutoff frequency around 0.3 THz. Considering that the spectrum of a terahertz source used in this work falls off rapidly below 0.25 THz, the reported loss measurements are, thus, the bolometer averages over the approximately 0.25 THz-0.3 THz region.