Silicon Nanowire Embedded Spiral Photonic Crystal Fiber for Soliton-Effect Pulse Compression

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new type of optical waveguide called silicon nanowire embedded equai-angular spiral photonic crystal fiber (SN-SPCF) using fully vectorial finite element method, where closely arranged arrays of air holes act as cladding and nanosize silicon material at the centre acts as core. We show that the proposed nanowire embedded PCF of 400 nm core diameter exhibits high anomalous group velocity dispersion (-3148 ps2/km), small third order dispersion (-8.6591 ps3/km) and high nonlinearity (443.2 W-1m-1) at 1550 nm wavelength. Soliton-effect pulse compression of femtosecond pulses in a silicon nanowire-spiral photonic crystal fiber at 1550 nm is numerically studied. We demonstrate a pulse compression of 75 fs input pulse to about 4 fs by the simultaneous actions of both linear effects (a large anomalous group velocity dispersion and a small third order dispersion) and the nonlinear effect (an effective high nonlinearity).