Sapphire Fiber Polishing Kit

Sapphire fibers have a crystalline structure, and therefore do not cleave in the same fashion as quartz fibers. Sapphire also has a very high hardness (9 Mohs scale, 2100 Knoop hardness) compared to quartz fibers (7 Mohs scale, 820 Knoop hardness). Materials and methods used for standard optical fibers must therefore be altered to accommodate sapphire fibers. Photran has developed guidelines for sapphire polishing: Please note: We will soon make available our "Recommended Procedure for Hand Polishing Photran Sapphire Optical Fiber" on this website as a downloadable PDF.

Many fiber users are already fully equipped with lapping equipment, diamond abrasive lapping films, and fixtures for holding and polishing bare fibers and connector mounted fibers. For users that do not have the necessary materials, or equipment, Photran has assembled a kit for use in polishing Photran Sapphire optical fibers. The kit includes a range of diamond lapping film grit sizes for coarse (30 µm) through final (0.1 µm) polishing. A diamond scribe, and SMA polishing fixture is also provided.