Optical Fiber End Preparation for Low-Loss Splices

With installation and maintenance consuming an ever-larger share of system costs, simple and inexpensive splicing techniques have become a prerequisite for competitive communication systems. One bottleneck in optical fiber cable splicing is the fiber end preparation, as conventional grinding and polishing techniques turn out to be timeconsuming and costly, especially in the field. It is well known that glass fibers sometimes break with flat and perpendicular end faces if they are previously scored, 1 and it has thus become common practice in the laboratory to obtain good ends in this way by trial and error. Besides being faster and simpler, this technique has the added advantage of producing perfectly clean surfaces uncontaminated by lossy residues. Such ends were recently used in fiber joining experiments to determine eventual splice losses. 2-5 The lowest losses obtained were about 10 percent for single-mode fibers 4,5 and 3 percent for multimode fibers. 2 For such laboratory practice to become useful technology, absolute control of the breaking process and utmost reliability in obtaining a 1579