Soliton spectral tunnelling in photonic crystal fibre with sub-wavelength core defect

A numerical study of soliton spectral tunnelling in an index-guiding photonic crystal fibre with a sub-wavelength central air core defect is presented. Specifically, for a fibre design where two regions of anomalous dispersion bracket a 90 nm wide region of normal dispersion, simulations show tunnelling from 1300 to 1475 nm across the forbidden normal dispersion regime, with near unity efficiency. In addition, this effect can be exploited to obtain over a factor of two nonlinear pulse compression by interrupting propagation at the distance at which soliton tunnelling occurs.