Nineteen-port photonic lantern with multimode delivery fiber

We demonstrate efficient multimode (MM) to single-mode (SM) conversion in a 19-port photonic lantern with a 50 mu m core MM delivery fiber. The photonic lantern can be used within the field of astrophotonics for coupling MM starlight to an ensemble of SM fibers in order to perform fiber-Bragg-grating-based spectral filtering. An MM delivery fiber spliced to the photonic lantern offers the advantage that the delivery fiber guides the light from the focal plane of the telescope to the splitter. Therefore, it is no longer necessary to have the splitter mounted directly in the focal plane of the telescope. The coupling loss from a 50 mu m core MM fiber to an ensemble of 19 SM fibers and back to a 50 mu m core MM fiber is below 1.1 dB. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America