Photonic jet: key role of injection for etchings with a shaped optical fiber tip

Abstract

We demonstrate the key role of the laser injection into a multimode fiber to obtain a photonic jet (PJ). PJ, a high concentrated propagating beam with a full width at half maximum smaller than the diffraction limit, is here generated with a shaped optical fiber tip using a pulsed laser source (1064~nm, 100~ns, 35~kHz). Three optical injection systems of light are compared. For similar etched marks on silicon with diameters around 1~$\mu$m, we show that the required ablation energy is minimum when the injected light beam is close to the fundamental mode diameter of the fiber. Thus, we confirm experimentally that to obtain a PJ out of an optical fiber, light injection plays a role as important as that of the tip shape, and therefore the role of the fundamental mode in the process.