Significance of leaky rays in liquid-filled optical fibres

Estimates have been made of the attenuations of skew rays due to cladding loss in liquid-filled optical fibres, with a view to determining the significance of leaky rays. The results show that, although the least attenuated leaky rays suffer much less loss than the most attenuated trapped rays, their losses are still considerably more than those suffered by the majority of the trapped rays. As a consequence, the distances over which leaky-ray propagation is significant in liquid-filled fibres are shown to be much less than suggested by earlier reports, when only radiation losses were considered.