A novel Zeonex based oligoporous-core photonic crystal fiber for polarization preserving terahertz applications

A novel waveguide consisting of oligo-porous core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with a kagome lattice cladding has been designed for highly birefringent and near zero dispersion flattened applications of terahertz waves. The wave guiding properties of the designed PCF including birefringence, dispersion, effective material loss (EML), core power fraction, confinement loss, and modal effective area are investigated using a full vector Finite Element Method (FEM) with Perfectly Matched Layer (PML) absorbing boundary condition. Simulation results demonstrate that an ultra-high birefringence of 0.079, low EML of 0.05 cm(-1), higher core power fraction of 44% and negligible confinement loss of 7.24 x 10(-7) cm(-1) can be achieved at 1 THz. Furthermore, for the y-polarization mode a near zero flattened dispersion of 0.49 +/- 0.05 ps/THz/cm is achieved within a broad frequency range of 0.8-1.7 THz. The fabrication of the proposed fiber is feasible using the existing fabrication technology. Due to favorable wave-guiding properties, the proposed fiber has potential for terahertz imaging, sensing and polarization maintaining applications in the terahertz frequency range. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.