Specialty Optical Fibers Handbook

Chapter 13

Mid-IR and Infrared Fibers

James A. Harrington

Departments of Ceramics and Materials Engineering,

Rutgers University, Piscataway, New Jersey

13.1 INTRODUCTION

Infrared (IR) optical fibers are fibers that transmit radiation from 2 to approxi-

mately 20 mm. The first IR fibers were fabricated in the mid-1960s from a rather

special class of IR transparent glasses called chalcogenide glasses. It was well

known that mixing chalcogen elements, for example, arsenic and sulfur, can

form a dark red glass that is transparent well beyond 2 mm. In 1965, this arsenic

trisulfide (As

2

S

3

) glass was first drawn into crude optical fiber by Kapany et al. [1], ...