Polarization splitter based on soft glass nematic liquid crystal photonic crystal fiber

Abstract

A novel design of a polarization splitter based on index-guiding soft glass nematic liquid crystal (NLC) photonic crystal fiber is proposed and analyzed. The simulation results are obtained using the full-vectorial finite-difference modal solution along with the full-vectorial finite-difference beam propagation method. The numerical results reveal that the suggested splitter of length 8.227 mm can provide low crosstalk of better than -20 dB with great bandwidths of 30 nm and 75 nm for the quasi TE and TM modes, respectively. In addition, the reported splitter has a tolerance of ±3% in its length, which makes the design less sensitive to the perturbation introduced during the fabrication process.

Keywords

• Photonic crystal fibers
• nematic liquid crystal
• soft glass
• finite-difference method
• beam propagation method
• couplers and polarization splitters