Influence of blanket post-exposure on the thermal stability of gratings written in a telecommunication fiber using light at 193 nm

Summary form only. As a key component for today´s and future wavelength division and multiplexing (WDM) telecommunication network, fibre Bragg gratings (FBGs) have been heavily studied in the 1990s. The thermal stability is one of the more important topics because of the request for the reliability of components. It is known that there is a thermal decay process of the reflectivity after the inscription of FBGs and the accelerated aging is proposed as a useful way to stabilize the spectral characteristics. Another interesting method to improve the stability was suggested by E Salik. He showed a higher thermal stability in reflectivity for the unsaturated FBGs when the fibre is uniformly illuminated with UV light. We study this method.