DOOR

Optical fiber communication has many outstanding advantages. Its potentially wide application ranges from long-distance trunk lines to short-distance subscriber net-works. This is mainly due to the favorable features of optical fibers, notably low loss, wide bandwidth, freedom from electromagnetic interference, light weight and small dimensions. To fully utilize these advantages and to further expand the appli-cation areas, various micro-optical devices are required in addition to those included in the basic optical link (source-fiber-detector). Among micro-optical devices optical multiplexers and demultiplexers are probably the most important ones, because they allow wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) at a single fiber. WDM, in particular, makes optical fiber communication attractive for subscriber and data networks owing to the system flexibility thus introduced. Most of these devices include a lens coupling between a source fiber and a receiving fiber. The minimum insertion loss of such a coupling is completely determined by the aberrations of the incorporated lenses. This thesis develops the relationship between optical aberrations and couplin