Modeling of bend effects on fiber Bragg gratings

Sensing and telecommunication applications requiring the bending of optical fibers to small diameters are on the increase. Recent work has shown that the centre wavelength of fiber Bragg gratings has a bend dependence the magnitude of which varies with the type of fiber in which the grating is written. In this work the basis of the centre wavelength shift is investigated by modeling the effects of several potential causes for standard and depressed cladding fiber designs. The majority of the expected affects, including bend induced stress and mode field deformation, were found to result in small wavelength shifts in the opposite direction to those observed experimentally. However, a new account of the shift, based on simplistic geometrical optics, does show wavelength changes in the observed direction, of up to -0.15 nm, which is in the range of the experimentally measured shifts.