Fundamentals of Plastic Optical Fibers

Preface

People in the industry formerly held the vague notion that polymers were unsuitable for application in the high-performance photonics field. Twenty odd years later, however, we have seen the birth of photonic polymers in applications such as the world's fastest plastic optical fiber (POF) and high-resolution displays. Research papers written in the first half of the twentieth century by Einstein and Debye, which delve into the essence of light scattering, have become my personal bibles. From them, I learned that the more we strive to achieve a breakthrough, the more important it is that we return to the fundamentals.

What originally drew me into the academic field of photonic polymers, a field which combines photonics and physical sciences, was my meeting with the late Professor Yasuji Otsuka, a person who I have the greatest respect for. I was a fourth year undergraduate student when I joined Professor Otsuka's laboratory in 1976. At that time, the laboratory had just begun its research into optically converging plastic rod lenses. By creating a graded index (GI) in the radial direction in a rod-shaped polymer, the light passing through it would travel in a meandering path, forming an image even when both ends of the rod were flat. I found this to be a most curious phenomenon and became fascinated by polymers. What interested me at first was why a GI causes light to bend gradually according to the refractive index profile. Professor Otsuka was an expert in polymer chemistry, ...