Characteristic investigation of 2D photonic crystals with full material anisotropy under out-of-plane propagation and liquid-crystal-filled photonic-band-gap-fiber applications using finite element methods.

To effectively investigate the fundamental characteristics of two-dimensional (2D) photonic crystals (PCs) with arbitrary 3D material anisotropy under the out-of-plane wave propagation, we establish a full-vectorial finite element method based eigenvalue algorithm to perform related analysis correctly. The band edge diagrams can be conveniently constructed from the band structures of varied propagation constants obtained from the algorithm, which is helpful for the analysis and design of photonic ban gap (PBG) fibers. Several PCs are analyzed to demonstrate the correctness of this numerical model. Our analysis results for simple PCs are checked with others' ones using different methods, including the transfer matrix method, the finite-difference frequency-domain (FDFD) method, and the plane-wave expansion method. And the validity of those for the most complex PC with arbitrary 3D anisotropy is supported by related liquid-crystal-filled PBG fiber mode analysis, which demonstrates the dependence of transmission properties on the PBGs, employing a full-vectorial finite element beam propagation method (FE-BPM).