A study on the optimization methods for optomechanical alignment

Abstract

The alignment for optomechanical components is important in designing and manufacturing optical systems. This study uses optical fibers for example to find suitable optimization strategies for optomechanical alignment. The core diameter of the single-mode fiber is about 6 mu m to 9 mu m. Any slight misalignment or deformation of the optical mechanism will cause signification optical losses during connections. The alignment methods can be divided into passive and active ones. In the passive alignment, optical connectors, ferrules, and sleeves are used to align two optical fibers. In the active alignment, the best connection position with minimum connection losses must be found, and users usually take a lot of effort to do this. This study uses different optimum methodologies: non-gradient-based, gradient-based, and Hessian-based methods, to find the optimum position. The non-gradient-based method has low accuracy and the efficiency cannot be increased. The gradient-based methods seem to have better efficiency to find the optimum position because it uses gradient information to calculate the search direction in every iteration. Finally for the Hessian-based methods, it is found that the advantage of using Hessian matrix is not obvious because the light intensity distribution is similar to the Gaussian distribution.