DESIGN AND ANALYSIS OF SOLID CORE AND LIQUID CORE PHOTONIC CRYSTAL FIBER FOR SLOW LIGHT GENERATION

Abstract

Slow light in general terms is basically reducing group velocity of light. Slow light helps to buffer and process optical signals in time domain. Optical energy is spatially compressed using slow light and also used for enhancing linear and non-linear effects.

Photonic-crystal devices finds use in generation of slow light because they offer wide variety of advantages like on-chip integration, operates at room temperature, wide bandwidth and dispersion free propagation. Photonic Crystal Fiber (PCF) is a type of fiber which makes use of properties of photonic crystals. It has advantage of controlling optical properties and confinement characteristics over traditional optical fiber. PCF has various applications in fiber optic communications, nonlinear devices, fiber lasers, amplifiers, high-power transmission, highly sensitive gas sensors, and other areas.

When sound waves scatter light in a medium, it is known as Brillouin scattering. It makes use of three waves. Two of them are Optical waves and the third one is Acoustic wave. Scattering process occurs through the conservation of momentum and energy. Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) takes place when the interference between the pump and scattered light reinforces the acoustic wave by electrostriction or by optical absorption. SBS is the most preferred non-linear technique and has many applications like SBS lasers, microwave oscillators, optical phase conjugation and slow light.

In this project, we have designed two structures of Photonic crystal fiber for slow light generation with tunable properties. One is highly non-linear Chalcogenide Hexagonal Solid core photonic crystal fiber and other is Decagonal liquid core photonic crystal fiber. Both structures are designed using COMSOL MultiPhysics and various properties are compared. Graphs are plotted using MATLAB codes. Effective mode area, Maximum power, Minimum power, Maximum time delay and Confinement loss has been calculated and plotted for tunable slow light generation in the two structures.