Towards the engineering of nanoparticles in optical fibers at the micrometer scale

Optical fibers containing nanoparticles have recently attracted a great interest for applications such as fiber sensors and fiber lasers. Their development remains limited by a lack of control over nanoparticle characteristics (size, density, etc.). Here, we propose a femtosecond laser structuring process that uses local heating at a micrometer scale to engineer the characteristics of the nanoparticles and hence the light scattering of this type of fiber.