An All-Fiber Fan-Out Device for Varying Twin-Core Fiber Types

An all-fiber twin-core fiber (TCF) fan-out device is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The device is capable of simultaneously accessing optical signals from both cores for a variety of TCF types. The device was fabricated via bi-tapering of a fiber bundle consisting of two parallel large-core multimode fibers, each of which was tapered-spliced with single mode fibers. A commercial fiber fusion splicer was used in the device fabrication process for both tapering and splicing. A series of experiments were conducted in which two different TCF types, featuring different inter-core distances, were connected to test the functionality of the proposed device. The results demonstrate successful accessing of optical signals from the two TCF cores with a low crosstalk of -38.6 dB. The proposed all-fiber TCF fan-out device could be further developed for applications in novel fiber sensors or advanced optical communication systems.