Optical attributes of mode-field expansion in solid-core hexagonal microstructured optical fibers

To access the full practical utility of the solid-core (SC) hexagonal microstructured optical fibers (HMOFs), compact low-loss mechanically stable splicing of HMOFs to standard single-mode fibers (SMFs) is highly appreciated; however, collapsing of air-holes and the mode-field (MF) mismatch are the two pivotal factors contributing to huge splice loss. Under certain specific conditions, collapsing of air-holes can yield to MF-adaptation at the end-facet of HMOF, and thus, owing to lower the loss with SMF. Therefore, we intend to numerically simulate the results in respect of MF-adaptation in SC-HMOF based on selective and controlled collapsing of air-holes to optimize the MF-matching at the joint interface by employing a recently proposed numerical method, which takes advantages of finite-element method (FEM) in combination with a simplified Ring Model. For validating the applicability of our method, we evaluated the splice losses between dissimilar configurations of large mode-area (LMA) HMOFs and the SMF-28 at 1.55 mu m and achieved reasonably low-loss values which are coherent to experimentally measured values as published in the literature.

Automated summary

By selectively and controllably collapsing air-holes in SC-HMOF, MF-adaptation can be achieved, leading to reduced loss with SMF.