Analysis of Design and Fabrication Parameters for Lensed Optical Fibers as Pertinent Probes for Sensing and Imaging.

A method for adjusting the working distance and spot size of a fiber probe while suppressing or enhancing the back-coupling to the lead-in fiber is presented. As the optical fiber probe, a lensed optical fiber (LOF) was made by splicing a short piece of coreless silica fiber (CSF) on a single-mode fiber and forming a lens at the end of the CSF. By controlling the length of the CSF and the radius of lens curvature, the optical properties of the LOF were adjusted. The evolution of the beam in the LOF was analyzed by using the Gaussian ABCD matrix method. To confirm the idea experimentally, 17 LOF samples were fabricated and analyzed theoretically and also experimentally. The results show that it is feasible in designing the LOF to be more suitable for specific or dedicated applications. Applications in physical sensing and biomedical imaging fields are expected.