A THz Single-Polarization-Single-Mode (SPSM) photonic crystal fiber based on epsilon-near-zero material

Abstract

To overcome the crosstalk happening between two degenerately fundamental modes of a fiber in Terahertz (THz) regime, a novel photonic crystal fiber (PCF) that yields a wide range of single-polarization-single-mode (SPSM) propagation with large loss differences (LDs) is designed. The method used to realize this SPSM PCF is to deposit an epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) material in four selected air holes in the cladding, which ends up with four ENZ rings. These ENZ rings introduce significant LDs between the wanted (X-polarized) and unwanted (Y-polarized and high order) modes. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the LDs between the wanted and unwanted modes vary with the thickness of ENZ rings. With a very short length (4 cm) of the proposed PCF, pure SPSM propagation, i.e., the unwanted modes are 20 dB lower than the wanted mode, can be achieved from 1 to 1.2 THz.