Highly birefringent one-air-hole panda fiber

This Letter proposes a highly birefringent one-air-hole panda fiber, which is fabricated by corroding a single stress zone of the traditional panda-type polarization-maintaining fiber (PMF). An additional geometric asymmetry is induced in the fiber to increase the birefringence effect and enhance the light-matter interaction, which improves the perfor-mance of the sensor and the device applications of the special fiber. A theoretical and experimental analysis of the one-air -hole panda fiber demonstrates that the birefringence of the fiber can be of the order of 10-3, which is one order of mag-nitude higher than that of the traditional panda-type fiber. The corroded region provides a microchannel to be filled with a functional material to compose optical fiber sensors; a sample of a salt solution was filled into the microchan-nel to measure the refractive index with a sensitivity of 3760 nm/RIU (refractive index units). (c) 2023 Optica Pub-lishing Group

Automated summary

This paper proposes a highly birefringent one-air-hole panda fiber, which is created by corroding a single stress zone of the traditional panda-type polarization-maintaining fiber. An additional geometric asymmetry is introduced to enhance the birefringence effect and improve the performance of the sensor and special fiber devices. The theoretical and experimental analysis shows that the birefringence of the one-air-hole panda fiber can reach an order of magnitude higher than that of the traditional panda-type fiber. The corroded region provides a microchannel to be filled with a functional material for optical fiber sensors; a salt solution sample was used to measure refractive index with a sensitivity of 3760 nm/RIU.