High birefringence optical fibers such as elliptical core fibers and many highly birefringent photonic crystal fibers usually broke the symmetry of circle by introduced C_2ν symmetry. In this paper, a novel microstructured high birefringence optical fiber with C_1ν symmetry is proposed. Four air holes were introduced into the core of a circular optical fiber, circular symmetry was broken, and the core of this kind of optical fibers only maintained C_1ν symmetry. The degeneracy fundamental mode LP₀₁ was split into two modes LP^x₀₁, LP^y₀₁ because the symmetry of C_1v is lower than that of C_2ν , the difference between the patterns of the two modes field was larger. Using multipole method, we calculated the propagation constants of modes LP^x₀₁ and LP^y₀₁, the modal birefringence B is to the magnitude of 10^-2 which is almost tenfold greater than that of many highly birefringence photonic crystal fibers. The other advantage of this kind of optical fibers is that the fabrication of fibers with a few air holes is easier than that of photonic crystal fibers with many air holes.

Date Published: 29 January 2007
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 6279, 27th International Congress on High-Speed Photography and Photonics, 627976 (29 January 2007); doi: 10.1117/12.725900

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6279:
27th International Congress on High-Speed Photography and Photonics
Xun Hou; Wei Zhao; Baoli Yao, Editor(s)