Perturbation and manipulation of leaky modes in photonic crystal fibers

Abstract

Optical fibers guide light in a central core surrounded by a cladding. The most common fibers are step-index fibers, which guide light using total internal reflection in the fiber core. Recently, a new class of fibers, with a microstructured cladding, which also include photonic crystal fibers have been developed. The photonic crystal fibers have a periodic refractive index profile in the cladding and guide light using a bandgap effect or modified total internal reflection. Photonic crystal fibers promise to surpass the guiding properties of the traditional step-index fiber and are being studied extensively. However, these new fibers support leaky modes in contrast to the perfectly guided or bound modes of the conventional step-index fiber. Leaky modes are solutions to Maxwell’s equations that radiate energy in the transverse direction of the fiber. This energy leakage leads to growing fields in the homogeneous exterior. Due to these growing fields in the exterior, the normalization of leaky modes has been a long standing challenge. The normalization for bound modes, which have exponentially decaying fields as we move away from the fiber core, is achieved using an integral of the time-averaged Poynting vector over the xy plane. However, this expression diverges for the case of leaky modes. In this thesis, we derive a general analytical normalization for leaky and bound modes in fiber structures that is independent of the region of integration as long as it encloses all spatial inhomogeneities. Using this analytical normalization, which is an essential factor in any perturbation theory, we develop perturbation theories for interior and exterior perturbations in fiber geometries supporting leaky modes. The perturbations are considered to be changes in the permittivity and permeability tensors of the fiber, which also extend to the axial, i.e., the translationally invariant direction. We formulate the exterior perturbation theory to also treat wavelength as a perturbation. This is highly useful to obtain important fiber quantites such as group velocity as a simple post processing step instead of repeatedly solving Maxwell’s equations for different wavelengths. We demonstrate the accuracy of both perturbation theories on analytically solvable capillary fibers and the more complicated photonic crystal fibers. We also demonstrate the usefulness of a perturbation theory in studying disorder, which involves averaging over many realizations. Furthermore, we present a theoretical study of a novel design to reduce the confinement loss of the fundamental core mode in photonic bandgap fibers with high index strands. This is done by modifying the radius of specific strands, which we call “corner strands”, in the core surround. We demonstrate the usefulness of the analytical normalization in optimizing the fiber design by providing a physically meaningful way of comparing field confinement for different fiber structures. As fundamental working principle, we show that varying the radius of the corner strands leads to backscattering of light back to the core. By using an optimal radius for these corner strands in each transmission window, the losses are decreased by orders of magnitude in comparison to the unmodified cladding structure. We do a parametric analysis of this phenomenon by varying different structural properties such as radius, pitch and the radius-to-pitch ratios to find the optimal design. Thus, we generalize the previously studied case of missing corner strands which only works for certain radius-to-pitch ratios in the first bandgap. This design can be adapted to any photonic bandgap fiber including hollow core photonic crystal fibers and light cage structures.