Guiding properties of square-lattice photonic crystal fibers

Abstract

In this paper we have investigated the guiding properties of photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) with a square-lattice of air-holes in the cladding. We have shown numerical results of PCFs with various air hole sizes and hole-to-hole spacings over a wide wavelength range. The group velocity dispersion, effective area and effective refractive index of PCF have been calculated numerically. The waveguide dispersion has greatly affected the group velocity dispersion when hole-to-hole spacing is about 1 μm. The effective area is quite flat over the wide spectral range whether the hole-to-hole spacing is large or ratio of diameter to pitch is large. From the field distribution, we found that the field is tightly confined within the core region of PCF when the pitch is 3 μm and the air-filling fraction is 0.9.