Large-pitch kagome-structured hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

We report the fabrication and characterization of a new type of hollow-core photonic crystal fiber based on large-pitch (approximately 12 microm) kagome lattice cladding. The optical characteristics of the 19-cell, 7-cell, and single-cell core defect fibers include broad optical transmission bands covering the visible and near-IR parts of the spectrum with relatively low loss and low chromatic dispersion, no detectable surface modes and high confinement of light in the core. Various applications of such a novel fiber are also discussed, including gas sensing, quantum optics, and high harmonic generation.     

Partially liquid-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber polarizer

A compact fiber polarizer is demonstrated by the filling of selected air holes of a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with a liquid. The liquid-filling results in an asymmetric waveguide structure, leading to a large polarization dependent loss. A 6 mm long ethanol-filled PCF exhibits a polarization extinction ratio of ～18 dB over a wavelength range from 1480 nm to 1600 nm.     

Selective mode excitation in hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

Modes are selectively excited by launching light through the cladding from the side into a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber. Measuring the total output power at the end of the fiber as a function of the angle of incidence of the exciting laser beam provides a powerful diagnostic for characterizing the cladding bandgap. Furthermore, various types of modes on either side of the bandgap are excited individually, and their nearfield images are obtained.     

In-line fiber-optic etalon formed by hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

A novel fiber-optic in-line etalon formed by splicing a section of hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HCPCF) in between two single-mode fibers is proposed and demonstrated, for the first time to our knowledge. Such a HCPCF-based etalon acts as an excellent optical waveguide to form a Fabry-Perot interferometer and hence allows the cavity length to be as long as several centimeters with good visibility as the transmission loss of the HCPCF is much smaller than that of a hollow core fiber; this offers great potential to generate a practical dense fiber-optic sensor network with spatial frequency division-multiplexing. This novel etalon is demonstrated for strain measurement, and the experimental results show that a good visibility of 0.3 and a strain accuracy of better than +/- 5 microepsilon are achieved.     

Electromagnetically induced transparency in Rb-filled coated hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

We report the observation of lambda-configuration electromagnetically induced transparency as well as optical pumping in rubidium-filled kagome-structure hollow-coated-core photonic crystal fiber. We show that a polydimethylsiloxane coating of the fiber core reduces the linewidth of the transparency below that which could be expected for an uncoated fiber. The measured 6 MHz linewidth was dominated by optical broadening.     

High harmonic generation in a gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

High harmonic generation (HHG) of intense infrared laser radiation (Ferray et al., J. Phys. B: At. Mol. Opt. Phys. 21:L31, 1988; McPherson et al., J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 4:595, 1987) enables coherent vacuum-UV (VUV) to soft-X-ray sources. In the usual setup, energetic femtosecond laser pulses are strongly focused into a gas jet, restricting the interaction length to the Rayleigh range of the focus. The average photon flux is limited by the low conversion efficiency and the low average power of the complex laser amplifier systems (Keller, Nature 424:831, 2003; Südmeyer et al., Nat. Photonics 2:599, 2008; Röser et al., Opt. Lett. 30:2754, 2005; Eidam et al., IEEE J. Sel. Top. Quantum Electron. 15:187, 2009) which typically operate at kilohertz repetition rates. This represents a severe limitation for many experiments using the harmonic radiation in fields such as metrology or high-resolution imaging. Driving HHG with novel high-power diode-pumped multi-megahertz laser systems has the potential to significantly increase the average photon flux. However, the higher average power comes at the expense of lower pulse energies because the repetition rate is increased by more than a thousand times, and efficient HHG is not possible in the usual geometry. So far, two promising techniques for HHG at lower pulse energies were developed: external build-up cavities (Gohle et al., Nature 436:234, 2005; Jones et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 94:193, 2005) and resonant field enhancement in nanostructured targets (Kim et al., Nature 453:757, 2008). Here we present a third technique, which has advantages in terms of ease of HHG light extraction, transverse beam quality, and the possibility to substantially increase conversion efficiency by phase-matching (Paul et al., Nature 421:51, 2003; Ren et al., Opt. Express 16:17052, 2008; Serebryannikov et al., Phys. Rev. E (Stat. Nonlinear Soft Matter Phys.) 70:66611, 2004; Serebryannikov et al., Opt. Lett. 33:977, 2008; Zhang et al., Nat. Phys. 3:270, 2007). The interaction between the laser pulses and the gas occurs in a Kagome-type Hollow-Core Photonic Crystal Fiber (HC-PCF) (Benabid et al., Science 298:399, 2002), which reduces the detection threshold for HHG to only 200 nJ. This novel type of fiber guides nearly all of the light in the hollow core (Couny et al., Science 318:1118, 2007), preventing damage even at intensities required for HHG. Our fiber guided 30-fs pulses with a pulse energy of more than 10 μJ, which is more than five times higher than for any other photonic crystal fiber (Hensley et al., Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO), IEEE Press, New York, 2008).     

Supercontinuum generation in the irregular point of hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

Broadband supercontinuums (SC) are generated by soliton self-frequency shift (SSFS) of hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF) in our laboratory. With the pump works at 810 nm when the pump power increase from 400 to 600 mW, the Raman Soliton shifts from 2089 to 2215 nm, the bandwidth of SC increases from 2213 to 2320 nm. The ultra-violet part of SC is below 180 nm, and the mid-infrared part of SC exceeds 2500 nm. Moreover, the influence of pump power on SC is also analyzed.     

Low loss broadband transmission in hypocycloid-core Kagome hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

We report on the fabrication of a seven-cell-core and three-ring-cladding large-pitch Kagome-lattice hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF) with a hypocycloid-shaped core structure. We demonstrate experimentally and theoretically that the design of this core shape enhances the coupling inhibition between the core and cladding modes and offers optical attenuation with a baseline of ～180?dB/km over a transmission bandwidth larger than 200?THz. This loss figure rivals the state-of-the-art photonic bandgap HC-PCF while offering an approximately three times larger bandwidth and larger mode areas. Also, it beats the conventional circular-core-shaped Kagome HC-PCF in terms of the loss. The development of this novel (to our knowledge) HC-PCF has potential for a number of applications in which the combination of a large optical bandwidth and a low loss is a prerequisite.     

Stokes amplification regimes in quasi-cw pumped hydrogen-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

Pure rotational stimulated Raman scattering spectra containing nine strong spectral components were generated from a approximately 11 m long hollow-core photonic crystal fiber filled with hydrogen and pumped with nanosecond pulses having energies around 100-300 nJ. Observation of both transient and steady-state scattering threshold behavior is reported. Passage from the transient to the steady state is observed with a pulse as long as 14 ns. Convenient analytical expressions for energy and power threshold are deduced for the present configuration.     

空芯带隙型光子晶体光纤整体空气孔包层导光特性研究

 传统光纤包层中仅存在泄漏的倏逝波,能量较小,不利于包层传感的应用。增大包层中的能量,实现整体包层导光是提高光纤传感灵敏度的有效途径。从理论上分析了利用空芯带隙型光子晶体光纤(HC-PCF)包层进行导光的机理。在实验上选用带隙外的冷光源和激光对一种典型结构的HC-PCF进行了空气孔包层的导光实验,并利用折射率引导型光子晶体光纤和单模光纤进行对比实验。结果表明,带隙范围外光波在HC-PCF中传输时将不受禁带效应的约束泄露至包层中重新分布。包层中SiO2与空气孔的周期型结构将光波约束在高折射率介质中,实现HC-PCF整体空气孔包层中光波的稳定传输。PBG-PCF包层的整体导光在传感上有提高灵敏度的潜在价值。     

Polarization-dependent efficient Cherenkov radiation at visible wavelengths in hollow-core photonic crystal fiber cladding

Efficient Cherenkov radiation (CR) is experimentally generated by a soliton self-frequency shift (SSFS) in a knot of hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF). When the angle of the half-wave plate is rotated from 0° to 45° , the Raman soliton shifts from 2227 to 2300 nm, the output power of the CR increases 8.15 times, and the maximum output power ratio of the CR at 556 nm to the residual pump is estimated to be 20:1. The width of the output optical spectrum at visible wavelengths broadens from 25 to 45 nm, and the conversion efficiency of the CR can be above 28%. Moreover, the influences of the pump polarization and wavelength on the CR are studied, and the corresponding nonlinear processes are discussed.     

Improved air-silica photonic crystal with a triangular airhole arrangement for hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber design

We propose an improved photonic crystal (PC) cladding design for existing air-guiding photonic bandgap (PBG) fibers whose cladding airholes are arranged in a triangular lattice pattern. By increasing the sizes of concentrated silica regions in the cladding PC, we can have a larger degree of freedom in controlling the cladding bandgap regions. We predict that a fiber made from this type of cladding would perform better in terms of the PBG-guiding wavelength range, radiation loss owing to finite cladding size, and the ability to avoid surface mode problems.     

Optical rotation conveyor belt based on a polarization-maintaining hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

Optical Review - Hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HCPCFs), a form of optical conveyer belts, have been used to guide particles for many years. However, only the translational motions of a...     

Dispersion characteristics of hollow-core photonic crystal fibers

This work is devoted to the study of hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HCPCF) dispersion properties. An effective scheme of HCPCF eigenmodes analysis, lying in separate dispersion diagrams calculation for the cladding and for the HCPCF itself, was proposed. General recommendations concerning selection of proper fiber parameters were given. The text was submitted by the authors in English.     

Highly efficient Cherenkov radiation generation in the irregular point of hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

Highly efficient Cherenkov radiation(CR) is generated by the soliton self-frequency shift(SSFS) in the irregular point of a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber(HC-PCF) in our laboratory.The impacts of pump power and wavelength on the CR are investigated,and the corresponding nonlinear processes are discussed.When the average power of the 120 fs pump pulse increases from 500 mW to 700 mW,the Raman soliton shifts from 2210 nm to 2360 nm,the output power of the CR increases by 2.3 times,the maximum output power ratio of the CR at 539 nm to that of the residual pump is calculated to be 24.32:1,the width of the output optical spectrum at the visible wavelength broadens from 35 nm to 62 nm,and the conversion efficiency η of the CR in the experiment can be above 32%.     

A hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber polarization controller

A polarization controller was built by pressurizing laterally three segments of a commercial hollow-core photonic bandgap fiber. By varying the magnitudes of the applied pressures, the output state of polarization showed a good coverage of all the possible polarization states on the surface of the Poincaré sphere.     

2.5 THz环烯烃聚合物中空芯光子晶体光纤设计与实验

采用全矢量有限元法,仿真设计了一种工作在2.5 THz频段的中空芯太赫兹光子晶体光纤,用环烯烃聚合物材料（COC）制备了光纤样品,利用CO2激光泵浦气体太赫兹源搭建了测试平台并对光纤的太赫兹波传输性能进行了测试。实测光纤最低损耗0.17 dB/cm、平均损耗约0.5 dB/cm,在弯曲90情况下光纤传输损耗波动小于5%,具有良好的可弯曲性;光纤输出端口的模场分布测试结果表明,光纤是以主模进行传输,太赫兹能量很好地被束缚在光纤芯中。     

2.5THz环烯烃聚合物中空芯光子晶体光纤设计与实验

采用全矢量有限元法,仿真设计了一种工作在2.5THz频段的中空芯太赫兹光子晶体光纤,用环烯烃聚合物材料(COC)制备了光纤样品,利用CO2激光泵浦气体太赫兹源搭建了测试平台并对光纤的太赫兹波传输性能进行了测试。实测光纤最低损耗0.17dB/cm、平均损耗约0.5dB/cm,在弯曲90°情况下光纤传输损耗波动小于5%,具有良好的可弯曲性;光纤输出端口的模场分布测试结果表明,光纤是以主模进行传输,太赫兹能量很好地被束缚在光纤芯中。     

Low optical insertion-loss and vacuum-pressure all-fiber acetylene cell based on hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

We report a novel and easy-to-implement hollow-core photonic crystal fiber cell fabrication technique based on helium diffusion through silica. The formed gas cells combine low optical insertion loss (1.8 dB) and vacuum acetylene pressure (microbar regime). The estimates of the final gas pressure, using both Voigt interpolation and electromagnetically induced transparency, show a good match with the initial fitting pressure.     

Ultrashort pulse compression and delivery in a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber at 540 nm wavelength

We have fabricated a bandgap-guiding hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) capable of transmitting and compressing ultrashort pulses in the green spectral region around 532 nm. When propagating subpicosecond pulses through 1 m of this fiber, we have observed soliton-effect temporal compression by up to a factor of 3 to around 100 fs. This reduces the wavelength at which soliton effects have been observed in hollow-core PCF by over 200 nm. We have used the pulses delivered at the output of the fiber to machine micrometer-scale features in copper.