Design of nonlinear photonic crystal fibers with ultra‐flattened zero dispersion for supercontinuum generation

Abstract

The study reports on the design and performance of two air‐filled and two partial ethanol‐filled photonic crystal fiber (PCF) structures with a tetra core for supercontinuum generation. The PCFs are nonlinear with ultra‐flattened zero dispersion. Holes with smaller areas are used to create a tetra‐core PCF structure. Ethanol is filled in the holes of smaller area while the larger holes of cladding region are air‐filled. Optical properties including dispersion, effective mode area, confinement loss, normalized frequency, and nonlinear coefficient of the designed PCF structures are investigated via full vector finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. A PCF structure with lead silicate as wafer exhibits significantly better results than a PCF structure with silica as wafer. However, both structures report dispersion at a telecommunication wavelength corresponding to 1.55 μm. Furthermore, the PCF structure with lead silicate as wafer exhibits a very high nonlinear coefficient corresponding to 1375 W−1 km−1 at the same wavelength. This scheme can be used for optical communication systems and in optical devices by exploiting the principle of nonlinearity.

Keywords

• dispersion
• nonlinear coefficient
• photonic crystal fibers
• supercontinuum generation