Laser micromachining of optical fibre: an instrumentation enabler

The use of lasers to process optical fibre at INO goes back in the early ’90 when a team developed a CO2 laser-based process to anneal fibre-end surface allowing the lowest back reflection-loss connectors commercially available at that time. Since then, INO has developed several processes for stripping, cleaving, polishing, end-shaping, machining, bending, welding, soldering and packaging optical fibres. More recently, INO has used laser micromachining of optical fibres in order to enable innovative instrumentation in the field of chemical sensors, flow cytometry and gas chromatography.