Measurement of Numerical Aperture of Graded-index Plastic Optical Fiber by Using a Variable Aperture

There are technical difficulties in measuring the numerical apertures of multi-mode gradient-index plastic optical fibers (GI-POFs) due to their strong speckle noise originating from dopants, non-uniformity of gradient-index profile, and multi-mode interference. Therefore, we propose a new method of obtaining the numerical aperture by controlling the size of the incident laser beam and measuring the numerical aperture of GI-POF. The results show that we can get a value for the numerical aperture of GI-POF very similar to that measured by the conventional method. We can also obtain the optimum launching condition of input beam and maximum coupling efficiency.