Design of low-confinement-loss and highly birefringent index-guiding photonic crystal fibers

We present a systematic scheme to achieve both high birefringence and low confinement loss in index-guiding photonic crystal fibers (PCFs), using a structurally-simple PCF with finite number of air holes in the cladding region. By increasing the size of the outermost-ring air holes in the cladding region, highly birefringent PCFs with low confinement loss can be successfully achieved. The design strategy is based on the fact that the modal birefringence of PCFs is dominated by the inner-ring air holes in PCF, which is verified by a full-vector finite element method with anisotropic perfectly matched layers. Numerical results show that modal birefringence in the order of 10-3 and confinement loss less than 0.1 dB/km can be easily realized in the proposed PCF with only four rings of air holes in the cladding region. We expect that such fibers will be much easier to be fabvicated than those with more air holes in the cladding region. © 2008 Tianjin University of Technology and Springer-Verlag GmbH.