Supercontinuum Generation in Photonic Crystal Fibers Possessing High Birefringence and Large Optical Nonlinearity

Abstract: This paper presents the design of an index guided highly birefringent photonic crystal fiber which promises to yield very large birefringence ~3.33 X 10^-2 at 1550 nm and ~1.75 X 10^-2 at 1064 nm as well as large effective nonlinearity ~80 W^-1km^-1. Optical supercontinuum generation in the proposed fiber using a 1064 nm pump source with peak power of 1kW has been also presented. Finite difference time domain method (FDTD) has been employed to examine the optical properties such as fiber birefringence, mode field, V-parameter, walk-off and optical nonlinearity, while the Split-step Fourier method is used to solve the nonlinear Schrodinger equation felicitating the study of supercontinuum generation. Simulation results indicate that horizontal input pulse yields superior continuum in comparison to that of the vertically polarized input. However, the broadening of the continuum is about 1450 nm in case of horizontally polarized input light whereas it is approximately 2350 nm for vertically polarized.