Hollow Silica Photonic Crystal Fiber Guiding 101 Orbital Angular Momentum Modes Without Phase Distortion in C plus L Band

Abstract

We propose a new hollow ring core silica photonic crystal fiber that can support 101 orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes, maintaining a high mode quality without phase distortion, a low confinement loss, and a large effective index difference between the adjacent modes, which could open a new avenue of OAM mode multiplexing applications. The fiber consists of three layers: the circular central air hole, silica ring core, and circumferencing silica-air hole porous inner cladding. Using the full-vectorial finite element method (FEM), the modal characteristics of individual OAM modes in the proposed fiber were thoroughly analyzed by varying the number of air-holes in the circularly symmetric cladding. We found a general selection rule for the number of air-holes in the first layer and the topological charge to cause the phase distortion of OAM modes, for the first time. The phase distribution of the guided OAM modes was thoroughly investigated to select usable modes for mode division multiplexing. Parametric analyses of the proposed PCF are reported to optimize optical properties of the OAM modes.