Novel photonic crystal fiber with high birefringence

A novel high birefringence photonic crystal fiber (PCF) was proposed and the properties of this type of PCF were investigated with full vector finite difference frequency domain method. According to the results of numerical analysis, the two orthogonally polarized states of the fundamental mode become non-degenerate in the fiber and show strong linear polarization. The polarization properties are strongly dependent on the structure parameters of this PCF. Through choosing suitable relative structure parameters, it may exhibit birefringence as high as the order of 10^-2, at least one order of magnitude higher than that of the conventional D-type and panda-type polarization-maintaining fiber. It is shown that it may also exhibit ideal dispersion effect in a properly designed geometrical structure of PCF. So this type of PCF can be effectively used to fabricate polarization-preserving fiber and correlative fiber elements with special dispersion and polarization characteristics.