Design optimization of suspended core photonic crystal fiber for polarization maintaining applications

This work reports some important optical characteristics of porous core photonic crystal fiber (PC-PCF) for four different core structures which are elliptical, circular, square, and hexagonal. Numerical analysis based on the finite element method (FEM) shows that for the same core area, an elliptical core demonstrates the highest birefringence that ensures reliable polarization-maintaining applications. Moreover, other modal characteristics such as absorption loss, confinement loss, dispersion, power fraction, and effective area are also investigated thoroughly and compared. Besides, the suspended elliptical core PCFs can be fabricated easily with the existing fabrication technology.