Low Loss Anti-Resonant Hollow-Core Fibers and Applications

This paper updates the study of anti-resonant hollow-core fibers (AR-HCFs) and their applications. Such fibers have been shown to offer low-loss transmission windows which greatly extend the traditional spectral regions of hollow-core fibers into visible and mid-IR. The single-mode performance, large mode area, low dispersion and low nonlinearity make AR-HCF the most promising medium for high-power short-pulse laser transmission for scientific and industrial applications. Meanwhile, low-loss AR-HCF provides many meters of interaction length as a gas cell and greatly reduces the threshold of the stimulated light-gas interaction. Several optical pumped AR-HCF gas laser systems have been demonstrated in the mid-IR region. Fiber-enhanced gas nonlinearity would be expected to provide more possibilities of wavelength conversion and novel optical phenomena in future.