Design of photonic crystal fiber for efficient supercontinuum generation

Abstract

Supercontinuum generation (SCG) is the production of continuous spectral broadening. Efficient SCG is affected by the group velocity dispersion (GVD), nonlinear characteristics, waveguide geometrical parameters, and pump wavelength. Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) offer promising advantages over standard fibers such as desirable dispersion properties and controllable mode area. Silicon (Si) is known for its large refractive index which enhances the nonlinear effect in silicon waveguides. The promising properties of silicon is combined with the strong characteristics of photonic crystals in a silicon-core PCF to broaden the spectrum. The effect of varying the pump power, and input pulse wavelength on the broadening bandwidth is studied. The modal characteristics of the reported PCF are calculated using full vectorial finite element method (FV-FEM) with perfectly matching layers (PML) boundary conditions. In this investigation, the effective mode index, dispersion profile of the fundamental quasi TM-mode of the silicon-based PCF are simulated to quantify the performance of the suggested design. The simulation results show that the proposed PCF produces spectral broadening spanning the wavelength range 1000 – 3000 nm with bandwidths ranging from 892 ± 50 to 1659 ± 50 nm at both telecommunications’ wavelengths 1.3 μm and 1.55 μm as well as at the zero dispersion wavelength (ZDW) of 2.0 μm through a device length of 10 mm. It is also found that increasing the pump wavelength from 1.3 μm to 2.0 μm widens the SC spectra by 715 ± 50 nm.