Dispersion property analysis of antiresonant guiding microstructured optical fibers

Abstract

Antiresonant guiding microstructured optical fiber (MOF), a new kind of photonic band gap fiber, has several attractive applications including tunable filters, optical modulators and sensors. This new kind of photonic bandgap fiber with low refractive index core surrounded by a finite lattice of high refractive index inclusions reveals several intriguing properties, which are mainly determined by the individual properties of high refractive index inclusions rather than their positions and number. In this paper the dispersion properties of these fibers with hexagonal lattice of cylindrical high refractive index inclusions are discussed based on a full vector multipole method. The influences of inclusion space, inclusion rings number and core size on dispersion properties are investigated with photonic band gap location almost unchanged by keeping the diameter and refractive index of the high refractive index inclusions fixed. In order to evaluate the dispersion property dependence on high refractive index inclusions, the comparisons between fibers with different diameters or refractive indexes inclusions are also done. Numerical results show that the waveguide dispersion can be adjusted in a wide range for individual band with the bandgap location almost unchanged. It is confirmed that the dispersion is more susceptive to inclusion space and fiber core size than inclusion rings number. Individual properties of high refractive index inclusions can affect not only the location of band gaps but also the dispersion properties remarkably. This research is useful to optical fiber communication, fiber nonlinear applications and tunable device designs.