Progress in solid core photonic bandgap fibers

Abstract

We investigate both experimentally and numerically confinement and bend losses in solid-core photonic bandgap fibers. We proposed two designs, based on the addition of air regions in the cladding, allowing these losses to be reduced significantly while keeping the optical properties of bandgap fibers. We also present and discuss numerical results on the impact of transversal defects on the fiber confinement loss in the case of a realistic low loss fiber.