Dispersion Engineering of Highly Nonlinear Chalcogenide Suspended-Core Fibers

• Main Authors: E. Coscelli, F. Poli, J. Li, A. Cucinotta, S. Selleri
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 2015-01-01
• Series: IEEE Photonics Journal
• Subjects: Optical fibers; fiber nonlinear optics.
• Online Access: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7083701/

Chalcogenide optical fibers are currently undergoing intensive investigation with the aim of exploiting the excellent glass transmission and nonlinear characteristics in the near- and mid-infrared for several applications. Further enhancement of these properties can be obtained, for a particular application, with optical fibers specifically designed that are capable of providing low effective area together with a properly tailored dispersion, matching the characteristics of the laser sources used to excite nonlinear effects. Suspended-core photonic crystal fibers are ideal candidates for nonlinear applications, providing small-core waveguides with large index contrast and tunable dispersion. In this paper, the dispersion properties of As₂S₃ suspended-core fibers are numerically analyzed, taking into account, for the first time, all the structural parameters, including the size and the number of the glass bridges. The results show that a proper design of the cladding struts can be exploited to significantly change the fiber properties, altering the maximum value of the dispersion parameter and shifting the zero-dispersion wavelengths over a range of 400 nm.