Mechanical fabrication of precision microlenses on optical fiber endfaces

This paper presents a purely mechanical means of producing highly concentric spherical lenses at the endfaces of optical fibers. The production process has two stages. First conical lenses are produced in a grinding process that ensures excellent concentricity. Then the conical lenses are transformed to spherical lenses using a novel process called loose abrasive blasting. The cone grinding is carried out on a micro-grinding machine that has a sophisticated control system that enables the production of precision conical lenses. The blasting is carried out on a diamond blasting machine. Plots showing automatic centering performance of the micro-grinding machine and scanning electron microscopy photographs of the conical and spherical lenses are presented.