Open AccessMode area scaling with all-solid photonic bandgap fibers
Author(s) -
Fanting Kong,
Kunimasa Saitoh,
Devon L. McClane,
Thomas Hawkins,
Paul Foy,
Guancheng Gu,
Liang Dong
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
optics express
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.394
H-Index - 271
ISSN - 1094-4087
DOI - 10.1364/oe.20.026363
Subject(s) - photonic crystal fiber , cladding (metalworking) , photonic crystal , materials science , optics , photonics , fiber laser , equilibrium mode distribution , photonic bandgap , mode volume , optoelectronics , optical fiber , polarization mode dispersion , single mode optical fiber , microstructured optical fiber , radiation mode , multi mode optical fiber , plastic optical fiber , physics , metallurgy
There are still very strong interests for power scaling in high power fiber lasers for a wide range of applications in medical, industry, defense and science. In many of these lasers, fiber nonlinearities are the main limits to further scaling. Although numerous specific techniques have studied for the suppression of a wide range of nonlinearities, the fundamental solution is to scale mode areas in fibers while maintaining sufficient single mode operation. Here the key problem is that more modes are supported once physical dimensions of waveguides are increased. The key to solve this problem is to look for fiber designs with significant higher order mode suppression. In conventional waveguides, all modes are increasingly guided in the center of the waveguides when waveguide dimensions are increased. It is hard to couple a mode out in order to suppress its propagation, which severely limits their scalability. In an all-solid photonic bandgap fiber, modes are only guided due to anti-resonance of cladding photonic crystal lattice. This provides strongly mode-dependent guidance, leading to very high differential mode losses. In addition, the all-solid nature of the fiber makes it easily spliced to other fibers. In this paper, we will show for the first time that all-solid photonic bandgap fibers with effective mode area of ~920?m 2 can be made with excellent higher order mode suppression.