Toward single-mode UV to near-IR guidance using hollow-core anti-resonant silica fiber

Abstract

Hollow-core anti-resonant (HC-AR) fibers with a “negative-curvature” of the core-cladding boundary have been extensively studied over the past few years owing to their low loss and wide transmission bandwidths. The key unique feature of the HC-AR fiber is that the coupling between the core and cladding modes can be made anti-resonant (strongly inhibited) by suitably arranging the anti-resonant tubes in the cladding, which results in low loss and broad spectral bandwidths. HC-AR fibers have been fabricated aimed at visible, near-or mid-IR transmission [1-4]. Here we fabricate and characterize a silica HC-AR fiber having a single ring of 7 non-touching capillaries, designed to have effectively single-mode operation and low loss from UV to near-IR.