Impact of structural distortions on the performance of hollow-core photonic bandgap fibers.

We present a generic model for studying numerically the performance of hollow-core photonic bandgap fibers (HC-PBGFs) with arbitrary cross-sectional distortions. Fully vectorial finite element simulations reveal that distortions beyond the second ring of air holes have an impact on the leakage loss and bandwidth of the fiber, but do not significantly alter its surface scattering loss which remains the dominant contribution to the overall fiber loss (providing that a sufficient number of rings of air holes (≥ 5) are used). We have found that while most types of distortions in the first two rings are generally detrimental, enlarging the core defect while keeping equidistant and on a circular boundary the glass nodes surrounding the core may produce losses half those compared to "idealized" fiber designs and with no penalty in terms of the transmission bandwidth.