Application-specific microstructured specialty optical fibers: An emerging platform for exotic fiber designs

The huge progress already seen in optical fiber communication by the late 1990s led one to question `Is there any scope for further research in optical fibers?' The answer however turned out to be `indeed yes'. There emerged a resurgence of interest to design and fabricate exotic class of specialty fibers, in which transmission losses of the material would not be a limiting factor while nonlinearity and dispersion characteristics could be conveniently tailored. Research targeted towards such fiber designs led to the emergence of a new class of fibers, broadly referred to as microstructured optical fibers, which are characterized by wavelength-scale refractive index features across its physical cross-section resulting in photonic bandgaps when appropriately designed. This talk would focus on our research in recent years on designs of a variety of such photonic bandgap fibers for a variety of applications such as dispersion compensating fibers, metro fibers, supercontinuum (SC) light generating fibers, parabolic pulse generating fibers for fiber lasers, almost non-dispersive propagation of ultra-short light pulses for biomedical applications, large mode area soft-glass based fibers for mid-infrared wavelengths, and chalcogenide fiber-based mid-ir fibers as light source, SC generator, and for high power delivery.