Highly birefringent broadband-dispersion-compensating photonic crystal fibre over the E + S + C + L + U wavelength bands

The key features of this manuscript include a hybrid design of a square-core octagonal-lattice photonic crystal fibre with only circular air holes that exhibits high birefringence and broadband dispersion compensation covering the E, S, C, L, and U communication bands (1360-1675 nm) and a statistical comparison of the proposed design with some other recently proposed designs. A numerical simulation showed a negative dispersion coefficient in the range of approximately -134 to -385 ps/(nm km) over E and U bands with a relative dispersion slope (RDS), which is equal to that of a single-mode fibre (SMF, approximately 0.0036 nm(-1)) and a birefringence in the order of 2.13 x 10(-2) at the operating wavelength of 1.55 mu m. Because sensing applications require a highly birefringent fibre, statistical correlations between the birefringence and different parameters were investigated. Moreover, the effective area, residual dispersion, effective dispersion, and confinement loss associated with the proposed design are also reported. (C) 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.