Polarization properties of an optical fiber biconical taper with a liquid crystal cladding

Tapering technique is one of the most useful in the telecommunications as well as in sensing which offers up to now the best quality fused optical fiber elements such as couplers, splitters and combiners. It allows to fabricate various types of the tapers used as platforms of optical fiber transducers for chemical or biological sensors, as well. In the paper polarization properties of an optical biconical taper with liquid crystal cladding are presented. The optical fiber taper manufactured by mentioned above technique was sandwiched between parallel glass plates with ITO and alignment layers to form a tested optical element Standard nematic liquid crystals E7 and 6CHBT were applied as claddings of the tapered fiber. Sufficient transmission losses of infrared radiation were observed when orientation layers of glass plates were perpendicular to the tapered fiber. The main contribution of this paper is calculation the polarization properties of the tested samples by the Lu-Chipman decomposition method based on measured Mueller matrices. Analysis of measurements show that the applied voltages have the strongest influence on transmission losses and dichroism. These effects will be carefully investigated towards the voltage sensor and emulators of polarization depended loss.