Experimental investigations of bending loss oscillations in large mode area photonic crystal fibers

Abstract

We demonstrate experimentally that bending loss in large mode area photonic crystal fibers oscillates with wavelength. To do so we carried out loss measurements for different fiber bend radii and for different angular orientations. These results confirm the oscillatory behavior of bending loss vs. wavelength as predicted recently by numerical analysis [J. Olszewski et al., Opt. Express 13, 6015 (2005)]. We also found good agreement between our measurement results and our simulations relying on a finite element method with perfectly matched layers and an equivalent index model.