Companagnie Deutch has specific manufacturing requirements for the alignment of single mode fibres. For these applications fibres need to be aligned at the sub-micron scale in order to achieve high coupling efficiencies.

A mask dragging technique has been used to ablate V-grooves directly onto glass substrates. This type of technique for producing high resolution V-grooves could be advantageous in integrated fibre optics applications. A typical insertion loss for a single mode optical connector is about 0.3dB with a maximum accepted coupling loss of 1.3dB. The difference between 1.3dB and 0.3dB is in fact relatively small in terms of lateral misalignment (less than 0.5µm). To reduce the insertion loss the surface roughness must be kept below about 0.2µm Ra. The depth of the groove must be the order of 150µm with an angle of 90°.

The first prototype has been produced with 157nm on several substrates. Initial tests show promising results especially in N-BK7 glass.