Fabrication and optical properties of lead silicate glass holey fibers

Abstract

Since the first microstructured optical fiber was made in 1996, holey fibers (HFs) have attracted growing attention. Compared with conventional fibers, they offer a significantly broader range of optical properties such as photonic bandgap guiding, shift of anomalous dispersion into the visible, high nonlinearity in small core fibers and high power delivery in large mode area fibers. Therefore, HFs have a wide range of potential applications in optical technologies. The vast majority of research and development on HFs has been based on silica glass HFs fabricated by stacking capillary tubes. Very recently, compound glass HFs produced by extrusion technique have gained much attraction. The combination of highly nonlinear glass composition and small core HF geometry allows exceptionally high values of optical nonlinearity in fiber devices, which is of great importance for all-optical processing applications. The first single-mode non-silica HF made from lead silicate glass has demonstrated a 500 times larger effective nonlinearity than standard optical fibers. In addition, the HF geometry allows substantially more control of the waveguide dispersion than conventional fiber designs. In this paper, we describe the fabrication and properties of small core HFs made from highly nonlinear lead silicate glass. Since the properties of HFs are determined by the air filling fraction of the cladding, the reproducibility of desired geometries during fabrication is crucial. The impact of the process parameters during extrusion and fiber drawing is outlined. Propagation loss, dispersion behavior and effective nonlinearity of the HFs are discussed in terms of their actual geometry.

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ORCID for P. Petropoulos: orcid.org/0000-0002-1576-8034

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