Abstract
Since their inception, about 20 years ago, hollow-core photonic crystal fiber and its gas-filled form are now establishing themselves both as a platform in advancing our knowledge on how light is confined and guided in microstructured dielectric optical waveguides, and a remarkable enabler in a large and diverse range of fields. The latter spans from nonlinear and coherent optics, atom optics and laser metrology, quantum information to high optical field physics and plasma physics. Here, we give a historical account of the major seminal works, we review the physics principles underlying the different optical guidance mechanisms that have emerged and how they have been used as design tools to set the current state-of-the-art in the transmission performance of such fibers. In a second part of this review, we give a nonexhaustive, yet representative, list of the different applications where gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber played a transformative role, and how the achieved results are leading to the emergence of a new field, which could be coined “Gas photonics”. We particularly stress on the synergetic interplay between glass, gas, and light in founding this new fiber science and technology.
Highlights
In the last twenty years, photonics has witnessed the advent of a new type of optical fibers named hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HCPCF) [1], and has led to a huge progress in understanding the underlying physics of the guidance mechanisms, in its technology and in their applications
We present the modal properties of the cladding defect, by highlighting the salient features of the core fundamental mode such as its dispersion, its overlap with the silica, and how these properties differ between Photonic Bandgap (PBG)-guiding HCPCF and Inhibited Coupling (IC)-guiding HCPCF
In a similar fashion with a crystal made with a heteronuclear molecule, the results show that the PBG-HCPCF cladding unit cell is comprised with six enlarged glass nodes positioned at the apices of the hexagon and six thin glass struts forming the sides of the hexagon
Summary
In the last twenty years, photonics has witnessed the advent of a new type of optical fibers named hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HCPCF) [1], and has led to a huge progress in understanding the underlying physics of the guidance mechanisms, in its technology and in their applications. (ii) Structuring light with glass—In turn, the HCPCF cladding nanostructured glass results in structuring the modal spectrum of the cladding modes so as to exhibit in the effective index and frequency space (i.e., ne f f − ω space) specific regions with no propagating modes (i.e., photonic bandgap) or with a continuum of modes whose transverse profile and spatial localization render their coupling to some core guided modes close-to-forbidden (i.e., inhibited coupling) (see Figure 1b). The following sections of the review are dedicated to the applications, where we provide a nonexhaustive but illustrative list of the different applications that have been demonstrated in the last two decades
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