Highly polarization-dependent periodic coupling in mechanically induced long period grating over air-silica fibers

A very flexible and versatile tunable mechanical grating platform is introduced, with which highly polarization-dependent mode coupling is observed for three types of air-silica microstructured fibers: hollow core fiber, hexagonal-boundary holey fiber (HHF), and circular-boundary holey fiber. The resonances of gratings showed highly polarization-dependent broadband coupling compared with conventional single-mode fibers due to their unique beat-length dispersions between the core and the cladding modes, which could find applications in wideband polarization-dependent loss compensation. We further present significance of the spatial symmetry of HHF in distinct mode coupling for different rotation angles around the fiber axis.