A new design of photonic crystal fiber with ultra-flattened dispersion to simultaneously minimize the dispersion and confinement loss

Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) are highly suitable transmission media for wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) systems, in which low and ultra-flattened dispersion of PCFs is extremely desirable. It is also required to concurrently achieve both a low confinement loss as well as a large effective area in a wide range of wavelengths. Relatively low dispersion with negligible variation has become feasible in the wavelength range of 1.1 to 1.8 mu m through the proposed design in this paper. According to a new structure of PCF presented in this study, the dispersion slope is 6.8x10(-4) ps/km.nm(2) and the confinement loss reaches below 10(-6) dB/km in this range, while at the same time an effective area of more than 50 mu m(2) has been attained. For the analysis of this PCF, finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method with the perfectly matched layers (PML) boundary conditions has been used.