Abstract
Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) with hybrid guiding mechanisms have undergone substantial development in recent years. Due to the co-existence of index-guiding and photonic bandgap (PBG)-guiding mechanisms in this special class of PCFs, many peculiar properties have been investigated and demonstrated as advantageous and favorable in many applications. This review paper provides a comprehensive review of the recent progress of these hybrid guiding PCFs. The first part explains the principles of the hybrid guiding mechanisms in the PCF structures. The hybrid guiding PCFs are realized in three approaches, including polarization-dependent hybrid guiding PCFs, radial hybrid guiding PCFs, and two-core hybrid guiding PCFs. This is followed by a review of various development and applications for each type of hybrid guiding PCFs in the second part, including tunable filters, high power lasers, nonlinear optics, and polarization optics and sensing applications. Finally, the considerations and challenges on the potential applications of the hybrid guiding PCFs are discussed.
Highlights
Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs), a breakthrough invention of fiber optic technology which breaks the physical limits of conventional optical fibers and introduces new guiding mechanisms into the structure, have been rapidly developed with unparalleled features and performance for numerous applications in the past two decades
Index-guiding PCF refers to the structure without any high-index rods; whereas bandgap-guiding PCF refers to the structure in which all the air holes are replaced by the high-index rods
Hybrid guiding PCFs can be modified from the structures of both indexguiding PCFs and bandgap-guiding PCFs by introducing the structure that relies on the other guiding mechanism into the fiber
Summary
Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs), a breakthrough invention of fiber optic technology which breaks the physical limits of conventional optical fibers and introduces new guiding mechanisms into the structure, have been rapidly developed with unparalleled features and performance for numerous applications in the past two decades. PCFs have introduced broad opportunities for nonlinear optics as reviewed in [13], [14] As it is a rapidly developing field, active research effort is being continuously devoted to the advancement of the PCF technologies and realizations of the various applications. Because of the interactions between the two guiding mechanisms, hybrid guiding PCFs exhibit interesting properties which enable many exploitable applications. Substantial development in hybrid guiding PCFs has been witnessed, from realizations of tunable filters, high power lasers, nonlinear optics, and polarizations optics to various sensing applications. The operating principles of the hybrid guiding mechanisms in the hybrid guiding PCFs are introduced, followed by an overview on the progress in the various development and applications. A discussion on their opportunities and challenges is presented
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