Design and analysis of microstructured optical fibers

• Main Author: Hu, Juanjuan.
• Other Authors: Shum Ping
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2010
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering::Optics, optoelectronics, photonics
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/21192
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Microstructured optical fibers (MOFs) have attracted great research interest in the past decade due to their unique optical properties over conventional fibers. They provide unprecedented design freedom in shaping the optical properties, including birefringence, dispersion, nonlinearity, cutoff conditions, etc. Moreover, the holey structure of the MOFs allows further tailorable properties by filling other materials, so that thermal or electrical tunability of the MOF can be obtained. This thesis concerns the theoretical investigations of the designs, properties and applications of MOFs. First of all, we develop a compact two-dimensional finite-difference time-domain (C2D-FDTD) model to study the mode properties of MOFs. The material dispersion and Kerr nonlinearity are incorporated in the analysis. We adopt a moving problem space technique in the formulation of the three-dimensional (3D) FDTD method for pulse propagation analysis. The advantage of this method is the significant reduction in the computation resource requirement since the problem domain is effectively reduced. The pulse evolution in a dispersive and nonlinear fiber is modeled and analyzed by the method. We design and theoretically investigate a hole-assisted lightguide fiber (HALF) with a wide-band ultra-flattened near-zero dispersion profile. The mode properties including the single mode operation, mode area, nonlinearity and confinement loss are analyzed. The proposed fiber can serve as an effective solution for high speed optical communication over broadband wavelength range. We formulate an analytical method to investigate the band properties of liquid crystal filled MOFs. The band structure calculated by the proposed analytical model agrees well with the results obtained by the numerical method, i.e. planewave expansion method. The thermal tuning of the transmission properties of such fibers is theoretically investigated.