An Effective Thermal Splicing Method to Join Fluoride and Silica Fibers for a High Power Regime

A repeatable and simple thermal splicing method for low loss splice between fluoride and silica fibers is presented. The minimum splicing loss of 0.58 dB is achieved experimentally with this approach. Meanwhile, the power capacity of this splicing joint is also tested with a high power fiber laser. The maximum input power is up to 15 W, only limited by the available power of the laser source. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on thermal splicing between fluoride and silica fibers operating in a high power regime without any complicated ion-assisted deposition process.