Weiwei Ling

Design of highly nonlinear photonic crystal fibers with flattened chromatic dispersion

A novel (to our knowledge) type of photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with high nonlinearity and flattened dispersion is proposed. The propagation characteristics of chromatic dispersion, effective area, and nonlinearity are studied numerically by using the full-vector finite element method. Several PCF designs with high nonlinearity and nearly zero flattened dispersion or broadband flattened, and even ultraflattened, dispersion over different wavelength bands are obtained by optimizing the structural parameters. One optimized PCF has a nearly zero ultraflattened dispersion of 2.3  ps/(nm·km) with a dispersion variation of 0.2  ps/(nm·km) over the C+L+U wavelength bands. In addition, the dispersion slope and nonlinear coefficient at 1.55 μm can be up to 2.2×10(-3)  ps/nm(2)·km and 33.2  W(-1)·km(-1), respectively. The designs proposed in this paper have bright prospects for applications in all-optical format conversion, supercontinuum generation, optical wavelength conversion, and many other fields.

A Thermal Performance Analysis and Comparison of Fiber Coils with the D-CYL Winding and QAD Winding Methods

The thermal performance under variable temperature conditions of fiber coils with double-cylinder (D-CYL) and quadrupolar (QAD) winding methods is comparatively analyzed. Simulation by the finite element method (FEM) is done to calculate the temperature distribution and the thermal-induced phase shift errors in the fiber coils. Simulation results reveal that D-CYL fiber coil itself has fragile performance when it experiences an axially asymmetrical temperature gradient. However, the axial fragility performance could be improved when the D-CYL coil meshes with a heat-off spool. Through further simulations we find that once the D-CYL coil is provided with an axially symmetrical temperature environment, the thermal performance of fiber coils with the D-CYL winding method is better than that with the QAD winding method under the same variable temperature conditions. This valuable discovery is verified by two experiments. The D-CYL winding method is thus promising to overcome the temperature fragility of interferometric fiber optic gyroscopes (IFOGs).