Laser ablative shaping of collimator lens for single mode fiber

A new scheme for the phase control of optical elements using laser ablative shaping (LAS) has been developed. An ArF excimer laser was used as the light source. This method was first demonstrated with glass-plastic hybrid plates of diameter of 5 cm on a interferometer. The wavefront aberration of transmitted light was improved from 3 /spl lambda/ to /spl lambda//5 which is good enough for general purpose of optics. This LAS scheme was applied to the fabrication of micro-lens for the collimation of laser diode (LD) and single mode fiber (SMF). In these cases, the output laser beam from LD or SMF was collimated by micro-lens, and the wavefront distortion of output beam were measured by a Shack Hartmann wavefront sensor due to large wavefront aberration. The wavefront aberration of output beam from the collimation lens formed on the output surface of SMF was corrected from 15 /spl lambda/ to 2 /spl lambda/ which is very close to the actual application for the connection of SMF.