Characteristic Analysis and Structural Design of Hollow-Core Photonic Crystal Fibers with Band Gap Cladding Structures.

Due to their flexible structure and excellent optical characteristics hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HC-PCFs) are used in many fields, such as active optical devices, communications, and optical fiber sensing. In this paper, to analyze the characteristics of HC-PCFs, we carried out finite element analysis and analyzed the design for the band gap cladding structure of HC-PCFs. First, the characteristics of HC19-1550 and HC-1550-02 in the C-band were simulated. Subsequently, the structural optimization of the seven-cell HC-1550-02 and variations in characteristics of the optimized HC-1550-02 in the wavelength range 1250-1850 nm were investigated. The simulation results revealed that the optimal number of cladding layers is eight, the optimal core radius is 1.8 times the spacing of adjacent air holes, and the optimal-relative thickness of the core quartz-ring is 2.0. In addition, the low confinement loss bandwidth of the optimized structure is 225 nm. Under the transmission bandwidth of the optimized structure, the core optical power is above 98%, the confinement loss is below 9.0 × 10 dB/m, the variation range of the effective mode field area does not exceed 10 μm, and the relative sensitivity is above 0.9570. The designed sensor exhibits an ultra-high relative sensitivity and almost zero confinement loss, making it highly suitable for high-sensitivity gas or liquid sensing.