Glass photonic crystals: fabrication, optical properties and applications

Fibers with a photonic crystal cladding are a new type of optical waveguide whose unique properties are of special interest in the context of the possibility of solving many urgent problems of modern optics. The cladding in the fibers of this type has the structure of a two-dimensional photonic crystal. It consists of a 2D periodic or random array of closely packed hollow glass fibers. If a fiber without a hole is used to make the core of such a structure, then the missing hole can be considered as a defect in 2D photonic crystal lattice. These photonic crystal fibers - holey fibers - support single mode propagation regime within a broad spectral range, allowing radiation energy losses to be considerably reduced in the single mode regime and the effective area of the waveguide mode to be substantially increased. These properties of holey fibers seem to hold much promise for enhancing the efficiency of nonlinear-optical interactions, pulse compression and creation of new efficient broadband radiation sources. In this paper we focus in several new proposed glass photonic crystal structures: technology of their fabrication, investigation of their optical properties using experiments and modeling.