Diamond unit cell photonic crystal fiber with high birefringence and low confinement loss based on circular air holes

Abstract

We propose a novel photonic crystal fiber (PCF) design with high birefringence and low confinement loss based on a diamond unit cell. Unit cell is a degree of freedom of PCF design, and highly asymmetric diamond unit cell can deliver both high birefringence and low confinement loss. In our fiber design, each diamond unit cell consists of two different sizes of circular air holes in a conventional hexagonal lattice, which can enhance the confinement loss with increased birefringence and can overcome the previous fabrication challenges of elliptic air hole PCFs due to the all-circular air hole structure. The optimized design shows high birefringence of 6 x 10(-3) over S, C, and L bands while maintaining low confinement loss. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America