R&D
11 March 2026
UV light quickly damages solid core fibres due to the high energy UV photons interacting with the glass and contaminants in the atmosphere. Swapping the fibre every few days, operating in a purged gas environment or vacuum are not practical for many industrial settings.
Skylark Lasers and a team from the Centre for Photonics at the University of Bath have partnered to test anti-resonant hollow core fibre to solve this issue. As the guided light only interacts very weakly with the walls of the fibre as it travels, hollow fibres have significantly longer lifetime than regular fibre for UV and deep UV transmission.
The fibres have proven extremely resistant to damage with no decrease in transmission over several weeks of operation at over 100 mW. There are a range of interesting challenges compared to regular fibre, particularly that the acceptance angle for coupling is much narrower because the core is larger.
Work is ongoing to extended lifetime testing and understanding how the fibre could be used in challenging industrial settings and at a range of UV wavelengths.
This work is funded by Innovate UK project number 10161728: Semiconductor Hardware Ultraviolet Laser Sources for Wide Bandgap Materials.
More information on the fibres can be found at DOI: 10.1364/OE.509212 – “Guidance of ultraviolet light down to 190 nm in a hollow-core optical fibre”