Single-mode optical fiber Fiberguide Industries

While single mode silica/silica fibers are available from a number of suppliers with standard polymer coatings, Fiberguide is unique in offering these fibers with high performance buffers/coatings of aluminum, gold or polyimide. A single mode fiber has a sufficiently small core diameter that it can only transmit a single transverse optical mode. Typical core diameters are in the range of several microns up to around 10 microns depending on the wavelength being transmitted. Conventional single mode fibers covered in this data sheet have circularly symmetric cores. As such, they can actually transmit two orthogonally polarized modes. Normally, this aspect is ignored because such orthogonal modes travel at nearly the same velocity and they can be treated as one. However, in very high data rate systems and other critical applications it is important to preserve the polarization state that is launched into the fiber. Such cases require the use of polarization preserving single mode fibers that are discussed in the accompanying data sheet.

More specifications...