Design parameters for fluoride multimode fibers

Numerical calculations of losses due to polymer coatings and macrobending have been made for step-index multimode fluoride fibers. To minimize such losses, fiber parameters must be chosen to give a large value for V, the normalized frequency. Due to the long propagation wavelength (2.5 μm) for fluoride fiber, the parameters needed are very different from those of silica fiber. Using the criterion that ⩾90% of the modes have losses ⩽0.01 dB/km, it was found that the cladding diameters need to be rather large compared to step-index silica fiber parameters. Although the mode distributions are unknown for fluoride fiber, using a theoretical Gaussian distribution, losses were calculated for the various fiber parameters