Field enhancement within an optical fibre with a subwavelength air core

Abstract

Tightly confined light enables a variety of applications ranging from nonlinear light management to atomic manipulation. Photonic-crystal fibres (PCFs) can provide strong guidance in very small cores while simultaneously offering long interaction lengths1. However, light confinement in waveguides is usually ultimately limited by diffraction2,3, which tends to spread light away from the waveguiding core, despite its higher refractive index. It was recently demonstrated that such spreading fields can be trapped by a nanometre-scale slot inside a strongly guiding silicon-on-insulator (SOI) waveguide4,5. In this letter we demonstrate the concentration of optical energy within a subwavelength-scale air hole running down the length of a PCF core. The core resembles a submicrometre-diameter tube with a bore diameter of 200 nm or less. The high intensity in an air hole, coupled with long interaction lengths, promises a new class of experiments in light–matter interaction and nonlinear fibre optics.