Analysis of modal characteristics and thermal effects on photonic crystal fiber laser

In this paper, thermo-optics effects on fiber lasers based on index-guiding photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) are studied. The modal characteristics of the PCF lasers are discussed in terms of the thermal effects. Modal analysis of PCF has been done with help of plane wave expansion and supercell lattice methods. The thermal analysis is performed by obtaining the effective index of fundamental mode and core confinement factor (CCF) when the fiber laser was pumped. The results show that PCF laser structure has negligible modal sensitivity to thermal load in comparison to conventional fiber laser. Analyzing the mode performance of the fiber laser under thermal load shows that the assumed PCF laser at 80 W/m pump power show similar to 500 degrees rise in temperature and 0.34% propagation constant variation in fundamental mode index and 0.04% CCF variation in fundamental mode. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.