Mechanical Splice Characteristics of a Hole-Assisted Fiber

The mechanical splice characteristics of a single-mode hole-assisted fiber (SM-HAF) are investigated both numerically and experimentally. Mode-coupling theory is used to investigate the mechanical splice loss characteristic of the HAF. We introduced an air filling fraction and a -parameter to allow us to consider an HAF with arbitrary structural parameters. We derive the optimum conditions (e.g., refractive index and temperature coefficient) of a solid-type refractive index matching material to realize good splice and return loss characteristics simultaneously. The validity of the derived conditions is investigated experimentally. Finally, we confirm that we can achieve comparable splice characteristics to those of conventional single-mode fiber splices by using the optimized refractive index matching material independent of the structural parameters of the SM-HAF.