Holey fibers with 0.4-32-/spl mu/m-pitch photonic band-gap cladding: fabrication, characterization, and nonlinear-optical applications

Summary form only given. Holey fibers, i.e., fibers of a new type with a cladding having a structure of a two-dimensional (often periodic) array of closely packed capillaries, allow many important problems of fiber optics to be solved and many ideas of the physics of photonic crystals to be implemented. Such fibers support single-mode waveguiding within a broad spectral range, allowing radiation energy losses to be considerably reduced in this regime. Holey fibers also hold much promise for nonlinear-optical applications. We investigate the properties of holey fibers with a photonic band gap (PBG) of the cladding tunable within the visible and near IR spectral ranges. Finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations used to calculate the photonic energy bands for holey fibers show that transmission spectra of such fibers display PBGs within the frequency range characteristic of the available convenient femtosecond lasers if a two dimensional periodic structure with a period less than 500 nm is employed as a cladding in a fiber.