Analytical evaluation of splice and bending losses of photonic crystal fibers based on empirical relations

Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) have been under intensive study for the past several years as they offer a number of unique and useful properties not achievable in conventional silica glass fibers. Important issues regarding the practical development of these PCFs are their splice and bending loss properties. In this work, we present an analytical evaluation of the splice losses as well as bending losses for PCFs using simple empirical relations in order to determine the Petermann-I and Petermann-II spot sizes as a function of the fundamental geometrical parameters — the air-hole diameter and the hole-pitch of the PCF. We consider the splice loss due to lateral, longitudinal as well as angular offsets, when a PCF is spliced to an identical PCF or to a step index single mode fiber (SMF). To deduce macro-bending loss in PCFs, we apply the standard radiation model for bend conventional fibers, making a full transformation of conventional SIF parameters to PCF effective parameters. The spectral response of bending loss is also investigated. The results can be utilized in the design and development of telecommunication and sensor systems based on PCFs.

[1]  D. Marcuse.  Loss analysis of single-mode fiber splices , 1977, The Bell System Technical Journal.

[2]  D J Richardson,et al.  Toward practical holey fiber technology: fabrication, splicing, modeling, and characterization. , 1999, Optics letters.

[3]  Dietrich Marcuse,et al.  Gaussian approximation of the fundamental modes of graded-index fibers , 1978 .

[4]  A.D. Yablon,et al.  Low-loss high-strength microstructured fiber fusion splices using GRIN fiber lenses , 2004, Optical Fiber Communication Conference, 2004. OFC 2004.

[5]  Jens Kobelke,et al.  Splicing Ge-doped photonic crystal fibers using commercial fusion splicer with default discharge parameters. , 2008, Optics express.

[6]  Wei Jin,et al.  Fusion Splicing Photonic Crystal Fibers and Conventional Single-Mode Fibers: Microhole Collapse Effect , 2007, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[7]  Ngoc Hai Vu,et al.  Bending loss analyses of photonic crystal fibers based on the finite-difference time-domain method. , 2008, Optics letters.

[8]  T. Kimura,et al.  Bending loss of propagation modes in arbitrary-index profile optical fibers. , 1978, Applied optics.

[9]  A. Bjarklev,et al.  Photonic Crystal Fibers: A New Class of Optical Waveguides , 1999 .

[10]  Kunimasa Saitoh,et al.  Design and characterization of single-mode holey fibers with low bending losses. , 2005, Optics express.

[11]  G. S. Kliros,et al.  Prediction of Macrobending and Splice Losses for Photonic Crystal Fibers based on the Effective Index Method , 2006 .

[12]  Wei Zhao,et al.  Numerical analyses of splice losses of photonic crystal fibers , 2009 .

[13]  G.E. Town,et al.  Splice losses in holey optical fibers , 2001, IEEE Photonics Technology Letters.

[14]  P. Roberts,et al.  Demonstration of ultra-flattened dispersion in photonic crystal fibers. , 2002, Optics express.

[15]  A. Pourkazemiand,et al.  COMPARISON OF nfsm ,n eff , AND THE SECOND AND THIRD ORDER DISPERSIONS OF PHOTONIC CRYSTAL FIBERS CALCULATED BY SCALAR EFFECTIVE INDEX METHOD AND EMPIRICAL RELATIONS METHODS , 2008 .

[16]  R. Buczyński.  Photonic Crystal Fibers , 2004 .

[17]  Wei Jin,et al.  Loss analysis of single-mode fiber/photonic-crystal fiber splice , 2004 .

[18]  Jacek Olszewski,et al.  Effect of coupling between fundamental and cladding modes on bending losses in photonic crystal fibers. , 2005, Optics express.

[19]  P. Andrés,et al.  Nearly zero ultraflattened dispersion in photonic crystal fibers. , 2000, Optics letters.

[20]  G. Keiser.  Optical Fiber Communications , 1983 .

[21]  M. Murawski,et al.  Methodology of splicing large air filling factor suspended core photonic crystal fibres , 2011 .

[22]  Wei Jin,et al.  Fusion splicing small-core photonic crystal fibers and single-mode fibers by repeated arc discharges. , 2007, Optics letters.

[23]  Kunimasa Saitoh,et al.  Empirical relations for simple design of photonic crystal fibers. , 2005, Optics express.