Hollow core optical fiber enabled by epsilon-near-zero material.

Hollow core optical fibers of numerous guiding mechanisms have been studied in the past decades for their advantages on guiding light in air core. This work demonstrates a new hollow core optical fiber based on a different guiding mechanism, which confines light with a cladding made of epsilon-near-zero (ENZ) material through total internal reflection. We show that the addition of a layer of ENZ material coating (e.g. indium tin oxide layer) significantly reduces the loss of the waveguide compared to the structure without the ENZ layer. We also show that the propagation loss of the ENZ hollow core fiber can be further improved by integrating ENZ materials with lower loss. This study presents a novel type of hollow core fiber, and can find advanced in-fiber photonic applications such as laser surgery/spectroscopy, novel gas-filled/discharge laser, in-fiber molecular/gas sensing, and low-latency optical fiber communication.