Photonic crystal fibers iv

Abstract

It has been nearly twenty years since the conception of photonic crystal fibers, as devised by Philip St. J. Russell in unpublished work dating to 1991. That work was a development of the photonic crystal ideas of Yablonovich and John who published two milestone papers on photonic crystals in 1987. The photonic crystal fiber (PCF) has given the field of fiber optics a newfound resurgence, resulting in revolutionary research and practical breakthroughs that would have proven otherwise impossible with conventional optical fibers; these include octavespanning light continua, air guidance of light with low loss over several kilometers, and endlessly single-mode fiber operating over several hundred nanometers. The unusual confinement characteristics of PCF have resulted in their use in applications such as fiber-optic communications and sensing, fiber lasers, nonlinear devices, high-power transmission, and highly sensitive gas sensors, amongst others.