A polarization maintaining hexagonal photonic crystal fiber for residual dispersion compensation

A hexagonal photonic crystal fiber with central elliptical air hole is proposed to simultaneously obtain flattened dispersion and high birefringence by using finite element method. Simulation results demonstrate that by properly tuning the dimension of the elliptical air hole, it is possible to achieve very high negative and flattened dispersion characteristics over a wide range of wavelengths. The proposed PCF exhibits large negative dispersion of −531.3 ps/(nm.km) over 205 nm (1360–1565 nm) and −454.4 ps/(nm.km) over 205 nm (1420–1625 nm) wavelength bands for the fast and slow axis modes, respectively. In addition to this, the proposed fiber also shows high level of birefringence about 0.01168 at 1.55 μm. Other important modal properties such as confinement loss, splice loss and effective area are also reported thoroughly.