Fabrication and characterization of porous-core honeycomb bandgap THz fibers

We present a numerical and experimental investigation of a low-loss porous-core honeycomb fiber for terahertz wave guiding. The introduction of a porous core with hole size of the same dimension as the holes in the surrounding honeycomb cladding results in a fiber that can be drawn with much higher precision and reproducibility than a corresponding air-core fiber. The high-precision hole structure provides very clear bandgap guidance and the location of the two measured bandgaps agree well with simulations based on finite-element modeling. Fiber loss measurements reveal the frequency-dependent coupling loss and propagation loss, and we find that the fiber propagation loss is much lower than the bulk material loss within the first band gap between 0.75 and 1.05 THz. (C) 2012 Optical Society of America