Abstract

Abstract
We report the use of the electric arc technique to apodise Fibre Bragg Gratings (FBG). Electric arc discharges applied at the ends of the grating produce a smoothing of the refractive index modulation profile which reduces the side lobes at longer wavelengths. Using this technique, a FBG was apodised with a side lobe reduction of 17 dB.

Abstract

Abstract
A simple splice technique to fuse a SMF-28 (TM) and a microstructured fibre using a conventional electric-are splicer is presented. The technique consists in applying the electric arc in the SMF-28 (TM) region. The fusion-loss dependence with arc duration for constant fusion power is also investigated. A splice loss of 0.25 dB is obtained with high rtproducibility. (c) 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Abstract
We propose and demonstrate an architecture of a 2 x 2 port optical cross-connect (OXC) using tuneable fibre Bragg gratings and optical circulators. The proposed OXC is scalable to N x N ports owing to the cascadability of individual routing modules, which perform routing of specific wavelength channels. The performance of the cross-connect is also experimentally evaluated.

Abstract
In this paper, we present a continuous-wave tunable fibre ring laser operating in the L-band. A bi-directional pumped L-band erbium-doped fibre amplifier provides gain to the loop. Tunability is achieved by bending a single-mode fibre taper using a micrometer drive, controlling in this way the spectral cavity losses. Laser emission is achieved between 1587 and 1606 nm, and low variation of the output laser power is observed over all the tuning range.