Impact of interstitial air holes on a wide-bandwidth rejection filter made from a photonic crystal fiber

We have investigated the spectral properties of a band rejection filter made with a long-period fiber grating written in photonic crystal fiber that has interstitial air holes. Experiments showed that only one mode was coupled strongly to the fundamental core mode over a 600 nm spectral range. The central wavelength of the filter could be tuned over that range without being appreciably affected by any other mode. By using the multipole method, we found that the interstitial air holes of the photonic crystal fiber played a critical role in limiting the number of modes that could strongly interact with the fundamental mode and in obtaining well-separated resonance peaks. Excellent agreement between theory and experiment was obtained.