Know All About Fiber Collimator


It is often required to transform light output from an optical fiber into a free-space collimated beam. Although to carry out this task, a simple collimation lens is sufficient, but it is necessary to fix the fiber end firmly at one end at the fixed distance from the lens. To fix the fiber at one end, fiber collimator is used. It is placed at the distance approximately equal to the focal length of the lens.

Fiber Collimator is a passive device that combines the fiber and lens for collimating the light that is coming from the fiber, or for launching collimated light into the fiber.


Features of Fiber Collimator

·    Fiber Collimator is made from a curved mirror or Collimating lens Thorlabs.

·    The light source in fiber collimator is placed at its focus that makes divergent light into a parallel beam or couple the parallel beam into the fiber.

·         It is available at a different wavelength ranging from 850 nm to 1500 nm.

·        It can either get attached to the bare fiber directly or uses a mechanical interface to connect to a fiber e.g. FC or SMA type.

For What Fiber Collimator is used for?

A collimating lens Thorlabs in fiber is used to narrows a beam of particle or waves. It either aligned a direction of light in a specific direction or causes a spatial cross section of the beam to become smaller. Generally, a fiber collimator is required to naturally transform diverging light from an optical fiber to a parallel beam of light.

Types of Lens Used in Fiber Collimator

Fiber Collimator can be constructed using any type of lens like fiber lenses, ball lenses, spherical lenses, spherical singlets and doublets, GRIN (Graded Index) lenses, microscope objectives, cylindrical lenses. In case of thermally expanded core (TEC) fiber, no lens is used. The material of the lens can vary from a glass to a plastic to silicon.

The most common lens used in the construction of fiber collimator is GRIN as it is easy to handle, small, relatively low cost, and competitive in optical performance.

Types of Fiber Collimator

On the basis of the light source, fiber collimator is classified into four types:

·      !  Pinhole Collimator: It consists of the thick conical collimator with a hole in the bottom.

·         Parallel hole Collimator: It consists of an array of parallel holes, perpendicular to the crystal surface.

·         Convergent Collimator: It consists of a group of tapered holes that focus at a point

·         Divergent Collimator: It is an inverted converging collimator.

Conclusion

Fiber collimator is an effective passive optical component that is used for collimating of a laser beam. It is very essential to select the right type of fiber collimator for the right performance of a network. You can pick the one from the wide range of available collimating lens Thorlabs from Kewlab products.


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