Modelling photonic crystal fibres with localised functions

Within the past few years, the new class of photonic crystal fibres has attracted significant attention in the international research community. In these fibres, the cladding structure typically is a system of air holes in a matrix of undoped silica. By properly designing this cladding structure unique properties can be achieved. Due to the complexity of such structures, modelling these fibres is cumbersome and time consuming. Thus, the particularities of the model used are of great interest. We use a variant of the localised function method to enable modelling of real fibre structures with finite claddings. In this presentation, we discuss the advantages and challenges of this approach. We further present a number of improvements of the method and some results, precise obtained therewith. With the rapid improvement of fabrication techniques the last few years have seen. control of the cladding structures has become possible. The ability to model these structures is, therefore, becoming increasingly important. It is, also therefore, increasingly important to precisely model the properties of these structures.