<title>Design and fabrication of photonic crystal fibers for high-performance systems and devices</title>

Abstract

Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) and photonic bandgap fibers (PBFs) for high performance systems and devices are reviewed. A PCF has an array of air holes surrounding a silica core region. The PCF has special characteristics compared with conventional single mode fibers. Theoretical analyses and measurements show that the zero dispersion wavelength of PCF is shorter than 1280 nm that is suitable for dispersion compensation at 1550 nm. PCFs with zero dispersion in the 1550 nm region were recently proposed. Another noteworthy characteristic of PCFs is their strong birefringence, which is induced by the size and arrangement of the air holes. A theoretical analysis and experiments showed high birefringence, three times larger than that of conventional polarization maintaining fibers. Therefore, optical components with better polarization maintaining characteristics are expected. The new topic is PBFs that have hollow core and a lattice in the surrounding region to form a photonic band gap. They are expected to realize low-loss, low-dispersion, and low nonlinerity fiber because the core is air. Recently we proposed a new type PBF to aim at wide bandgap opening by using superlattice structure. This paper describes the characteristics of dispersion controlled PCFs, polarization maintaining PCFs, and the band structure and experimental results of the new PBF. The potential of PCFs and PBFs will be discussed with reference to the next generation high performance networks.