Fabrication and applications of highly nonlinear silica holey fibres

Description/Abstract

Holey fibre (HF) technology provides a new way to fabricate novel highly nonlinear silica based fibres. The cladding of a HF is defined by an arrangement of air holes that run along the fibre length surrounding a central silica core [ 11. The reduction in core size and increase in refractive index contrast that is possible in a HF allows the production of fibres with extremely high effective nonlinearity. HFs can also exhibit, by design of the hole configuration [2], dispersion properties not possible in standard fibres, such as anomalous dispersion below 1.3 (greek mu)m, normal dispersion at 1.55 (greek mu)m or flattened dispersion over a broad wavelength range.