High nonlinearity extruded single-mode holey optical fibers

Abstract

In this paper we present significant progress on the fabrication of small-core lead-silicate holey fibers. The glass used in this work is SF57, a commercially available, highly nonlinear Schott glass. We report the fabrication of small core SF57 fibers with a loss as low as 2.6 dB/m at 1550 nm, and the fabrication of fibers with a nonlinear coefficient as high as 640 W-1 km-1. We demonstrate the generation of Raman solitons at ~1550 nm in a short length of such a fiber which highlights the fact that the group velocity dispersion can be anomalous at these wavelengths despite the large normal material dispersion of the glass around 1550nm., "Four-wave mixing based 10-Gb/s tunable wavelength conversion using a holey fiber with a high SBS threshold," IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 15, 440-442 (2003).

Dispersion-shifted all-solid high index-contrast microstructured optical fiber for nonlinear applications at 155μm

“…We attribute the excellent loss to the following: (1) the starting discs used for preform extrusion were finely polished to ensure a high optical quality and (2) the extrusion was optimized in terms of temperature and speed to minimize the formation of any defects in the structured preform. This is in contrast to the conventional soft-glass HF fabrication procedures which involve either extrusion [4] or drilling [5,6], which tend to produce significant surface roughness and/or surface defects in the original preforms that impact the interface quality in the final fibers and can give rise to relatively high attenuation due to light scattering at the interfaces between the glass and the air-filled holes.…”

“…These features provide the opportunity for drastic tailoring of the dispersion profile of the fiber over a very broad wavelength range and allow for extremely high values of effective nonlinearity per unit length. Following pioneering work on silica MOFs [1,2], the field of high-index non-silica glass MOFs [3,4] has developed rapidly. Such fibers offer significant potential advantages over their silica counterparts, particularly in the area of highly nonlinear optical fibers, since high-index non-silica glasses, such as lead-silicate, tellurite and chalcogenide glasses, possess nonlinear indices of refraction n 2 that can be 1-3 orders of magnitude higher than that of pure silica (2.5x10 -20 m 2 /W) [5].…”

Single-mode tellurite glass holey fiber with extremely large mode area for infrared nonlinear applications

“…These optical properties are the result of a combination of the wavelength-scale features in the microstructured cladding and the large index contrast between the material and air. Following the work on silica holey fibers (HFs), high-index non-silica glass HFs have developed rapidly, offering advantages over silica HFs in the application areas of high nonlinearity optical fibers and low-loss mid-infrared transmission [3,4]. Non-silica glasses such as tellurite (i.e., tellurium dioxide TeO 2 based), fluoride and chalcogenide glasses have excellent optical transparency in the wavelength range of 0.5-5μm, 0.4-6μm and 1-16μm respectively.…”

Highly nonlinear and anomalously dispersive lead silicate glass holey fibers

“…The combination of highly nonlinear glass composition and small core/high NA HF geometry allows a further dramatic increase of the fiber nonlinearity. Recently, a lead silicate HF with an effective nonlinearity ~550 times larger than that of standard silica fibers has been demonstrated [10]. Most nonlinear/high-index glasses have a high normal material dispersion at 1550 nm, which dominates the overall dispersion of fibers with conventional solid cladding.…”