Preservation of Micro-Optical Fibers by Embedding

Although micro-optical fibers have found many potential applications in devices and sensing, their optical and mechanical properties quickly degrade with time. In this paper a method to preserve micro-optical fibers by embedding from degradation is presented and studied. The power transmission of bare and Teflon-coated micro-optical fibers has been investigated along a long time. While in bare micro-optical fibers with 0.9-µm-diameter an unrecoverable loss of 0.2 dB/h has been observed, Teflon has been shown to provide a reliable protection against degradation.