In collaboration with our colleagues Sacha Medaer and Diego Di Francesca at CERN, we have recently published the first report of a detailed gamma and x-ray irradiation of a nested antiresonant hollow core fibre (HCF). Up to the maximum irradiated doses reached in the experiment of 100 KGy ad 240 kGy, respectively, virtually no radiation induced attenuation was observed – as compared to 2 and 3.5 dB/km measured in the best solid core radiation hard fibre.
This is not unexpected: although the glass photodarkens due to the creation of colour centers, in our HCFs less than 0.01% of the light ‘overlaps’ with the glass, making these fibres the best possible medium to transmit light in environments subject to very high ionising radiation doses.
Examples could be: long space missions (e.g. #nasa), nuclear decommissioning facilities (e.g. #nuclearenergy, #sellafield), high energy physics experiments (#cern), nuclear fusion reactors (#iter, #nuclearfusion ), etc.
More information about the experiment and the fascinating photolytic effects that occus in gas-filled HCFs under strong radiation can be found:
https://doi.org/10.1364/OL.504167
