Arti Agrawal

Soft Glass Equiangular Spiral Photonic Crystal Fiber for Supercontinuum Generation

An equiangular spiral photonic crystal fiber (ES-PCF) design in soft glass is presented that has high nonlinearity ( gamma > 5250 W-1 middot km-1 at 1064 nm and gamma > 2150 W-1 middot km-1 at 1550 nm) with a low and flat dispersion (D ~ 0.8 ps/kmmiddotnm and dispersion slope ~ -0.7 ps/km middot nm2 at 1060 nm). The design inspired by nature is characterized by a full-vectorial finite element method. The ES-PCF presented improves over the mode confinement of triangular core designs and dispersion control of conventional hexagonal PCF, combining the advantages of both designs; it can be an excellent candidate for generating supercontinuum pumped at 1.06 mum.

Design and Characterization of Low-Loss Porous-Core Photonic Crystal Fiber

A rigorous modal solution approach, based on the numerically efficient finite-element method (FEM), has been used to design and characterize a photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with a porous air core, which has the potential for use for low-loss guidance of terahertz (THz) waves. Here, for the first time, it is reported that a large fraction of the power that is also well confined in the waveguide can be guided in the low-loss air holes, thus to reduce the overall modal loss. This novel PCF design can readily be fabricated by use of a range of techniques including stack-and-draw, extrusion, and drilling.

Golden spiral photonic crystal fiber : polarization and dispersion properties

A golden spiral photonic crystal fiber (GS-PCF) design is presented in which air holes are arranged in a spiral pattern governed by the golden ratio, where the design has been inspired by the optimal arrangement of seeds found in nature. The birefringence and polarization properties of this fiber are analyzed using a vectorial finite-element method. The fiber that is investigated shows a large modal birefringence peak value of 0.016 at an operating wavelength of 1.55 microm and exhibits highly tuneable dispersion with multiple zero dispersion wavelengths and also large normal dispersion. The GS-PCF design has identical circular air holes that potentially simplify fabrication. In light of its properties, the GS-PCF could have application as a highly birefringent fiber and in nonlinear optics, and moreover the 2D chiral nature of the pattern could yield exotic properties.

New method for nonparaxial beam propagation

A new method for solving the wave equation is presented that is nonparaxial and can be applied to wide-angle beam propagation. It shows very good stability characteristics in the sense that relatively larger step sizes can be taken. An implementation by use of the collocation method is presented in which only simple matrix multiplications are involved and no numerical matrix diagonalization or inversion is needed. The method is hence faster and is also highly accurate.

Characterization of silicon nanowire by use of full-vectorial finite element method

We have carried out a rigorous H-field-based full-vectorial modal analysis and used it to characterize, more accurately, the abrupt dielectric discontinuity of a high index contrast optical waveguide. The full-vectorial H and E fields and the Poynting vector profiles are described in detail. It has been shown through this work that the mode profile of a circular silicon nanowire is not circular and also contains a strong axial field component. The single-mode operation, vector field profiles, modal hybridness, modal ellipticity, and group velocity dispersion of this silicon nanowire are also presented.

Ultra low bending loss equiangular spiral photonic crystal fibers in the terahertz regime

An Equiangular Spiral Photonic Crystal Fiber (ES-PCF) design in Topas® for use in the Terahertz regime is presented. The design shows ultra low bending loss and very low confinement loss compared to conventional Hexagonal PCF (H-PCF). The ES-PCF has excellent modal confinement properties, together with several parameters to allow the optimization of the performance over a range of important characteristics. A full vector Finite Element simulation has been used to characterize the design which can be fabricated by a range of techniques including extrusion and drilling.

Ultrabroad supercontinuum generation in tellurite equiangular spiral photonic crystal fiber

Simulations are presented of a very broad and flat supercontinuum (SC) in both the normal and anomalous group velocity dispersion regimes of the same equiangular spiral photonic crystal fiber at low pumping powers. For a pump wavelength at 1557 nm and average pump power of 11.2 mW, we obtained a bandwidth >3 μm (970 nm–4100 nm) at 40 dB below the peak spectral power with fiber dispersion ∼2.1 ps/km nm at 1557 nm. In the same fiber, at pump wavelength 1930 nm and average pump power of 12 mW the SC bandwidth was more than two octaves (1300 nm–3700 nm) and dispersion was ∼1.3 ps/km nm at 1930 nm. This demonstrates the potential use of the fiber for multi-wavelength pumping with commercially available sources at fairly low power.

Stacking the Equiangular Spiral

We present an algorithm that adapts the mature stack and draw (SaD) methodology for fabricating the exotic equiangular spiral photonic crystal fiber (ES-PCF). The principle of Steiner chains and circle packing is exploited to obtain a nonhexagonal design using a stacking procedure based on hexagonal close packing. The optical properties of the proposed structure are promising for supercontinuum generation. This approach could make accessible not only the equiangular spiral but also other quasi-crystal PCF through SaD.

A new finite-difference-based method for wide-angle beam propagation

A novel split-step finite-difference method for wide-angle beam propagation is presented. The formulation allows solution of the second-order scalar wave equation without having to make the slowly varying envelope and one-way propagation approximations. The method is highly accurate and numerically efficient requiring only simple matrix multiplication for propagation.

Metal-Coated Defect-Core Photonic Crystal Fiber for THz Propagation

Modal solutions for metal-coated defect-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with a central air-hole have been obtained by using a full-vectorial finite element method to model the guidance of THz waves. It has been shown that the surface plasmon modes can couple with the defect-core PCF mode to form supermodes, with potential for sensing applications.