Advanced fibre Bragg grating design and technology

The technology of Bragg gratings has matured significantly over the past years, now to the extend where significant fibre-optic companies are being formed with main emphasis based on and around Bragg grating technology. With the recent advances in the manufacturing capabilities of Bragg gratings there obviously also will develop a demand for filters of even higher complexity to perform very specific filtering tasks. Currently it is the imagination that often sets the limits for what can be achieved experimentally. A superstructured Bragg grating refers to a Bragg gratings where a slowly varying apodisation-envelope is imposed on top of the fast underlying Bragg grating pitch. Such an envelope, performed in real-space, will result in a specific response in frequency space often uniquely defined by the superstructure profile. In this tutorial we will review the evolution of Bragg grating design and manufacturing techniques and will show examples of the current state-of-the-art Bragg gratings and application of these in high performance systems environments. The tutorial will focus on the requirements to super-structured Bragg gratings in systems and also discuss where the practical limitation lay for manufacturability