Design of highly birefringent photonic crystal fiber with low dispersion at communication wavelength

A novel design of Photonic Crystal Fibers (PCFs) have been studied. The designed fiber has been simulated using OptiFDTD software. The structure has hexagonal lattice and consists of air holes of circular geometry. However with an intention to achieve high birefringence, the symmetry of the core has been broken. Two elliptical air holes with four and half times larger than circular air holes has been introduced. The simulated results shows that designed fiber reports very high birefringence. Moreover at all the four optical windows it reports birefringence of the order of 10^-2. Similarly dispersion observed is very low, which assures the fiber to transmit data at higher rate. Besides these we also studied the other propagation characteristics like normalized frequency, confinement loss and mode field distribution.