Polarization dependent emission characteristics of Rayleigh scattering in nanoparticle-doped optical fibers

This article presents and experimentally validates a radiometric model for the polarization dependent side-emission characteristics of Rayleigh scattering in optical fibers. A radiometric setup is developed to measure the three-dimensional cylindrical radiation profiles of two nanoparticle-doped silica single-mode fibers at 1550 nm. The effects of radial distance, longitudinal position, and input polarization are explored using two-dimensional azimuthal radiation patterns and fitted to the radiometric model with an aggregated mean relative residual (MRR) of (2.52±2.32) %. The model is fitted to a complete three-dimensional radiation pattern with an MRR of (7.25±6.22) %. The wavelength dependent longitudinal emission is measured over the C-band. The static polarization dependent irradiance is characterized and fitted to the radiometric model with an MRR of (2.01±1.07) %. Improved understanding of the emission characteristics of Rayleigh scattering in optical fibers may benefit distributed sensing, illumination, and optical communication applications.