Patent ID: 8705918

Claim:
An optical arrangement comprising: a plurality of planar core fibers arranged sequentially end to end along a common optical axis, each fiber having a high-aspect ratio cross-section core, with a wide dimension defining a slow axis of the core and a narrow dimension defining a fast axis of the core, the slow axes of the cores of neighboring fibers being oriented orthogonal to one another and the fast axes of the cores of the neighboring fibers being oriented orthogonal to one another; and for each pair of neighboring fibers, focusing optics being disposed between ends of a first fiber and a second fiber, the focusing optics being spaced from the ends at distances selected to expand and collimate a beam along the fast-axis of the core of the first fiber and focus the beam along the slow-axis of the core of the first fiber so as to transform a fundamental mode of the core of the first fiber into a fundamental mode of the core of the second fiber.