Fusion splicing holey fibers and single-mode fibers: A simple method to reduce loss and increase strength

We demonstrate a novel method for low-loss splicing Ge-doped holey fibers (HF) with subwavelength core size and high numerical aperture fibers by using a conventional fusion splicer. We found that a large overlap distance of the fibers during fusion would decrease the splice loss and increase the splice strength. The lowest splice loss achieved for a fiber with a core diameter of 1.27 μm and air-filling fraction of >0.95 was ∼1 dB at 1550 nm, with a bend failure radius of 0.8 cm. With the same method, we also observed improvement in terms of loss and strength with larger core size HF.