Dispersion limits of the small mode area photonic crystal fibers designed as a broadband compensator

Abstract

Nonlinear photonic crystal fibers with small effective mode area allow to control chromatic dispersion in the near-infrared region. In this paper the chromatic dispersion is controlled entirely by structural parameters and the influence of each structural parameter is examined and described in detail. Understanding of the influence not only permits fiber design and dispersion tailoring, but also predicts the potential manufacturing tolerances. As a consequence, the fiber structural parameters are modified to found the balance between the operating bandwidth and the high negative dispersion parameter. We found that the limit value for the dispersion parameter is of about −1600 ps•nm -1 •km -1 at 1550 nm whereas the desired dispersion slope is achieved over the 120 nm wide band. We predict that the negative dispersion parameter cannot be higher in the small effective mode area photonic crystal fibers operating over the bandwidth larger than the one considered in our paper. The results are calculated by the full-vectorial finite difference frequency domain method.