Photonic crystal fibers

For the construction of optical fibers, plastic materials or glass materials are preferred. In PCS fibers, plastic material is used for cladding construction and silica glass for core construction. The new development of photonic crystal fibers offer a fine microstructure within the fiber and are highly periodic. High periodicity is due to the unique fabrication process. There are two mechanisms for light propagation in photonic crystal fibers against the one, total internal reflection in conventional fiber. Photonic bandgap effect results in trapping of some modes. Photonic crystal fibers brought revolutionary changes in various optical fields such as long period gratings, tunable coupled cavity fiber lasers, wavelength converters, wavelength demultiplexers, multimode interference power splitters, fiber amplifiers, multichannel add/drop filters etc. Transmission losses can be appreciably lowered with the usage of photonic crystal fibers. This is due to the fact that during fabrication, highly purified Silicon is used as the base material.