We present the fabrication and use of plastic Photonic Band Gap Bragg fibers in photonic textiles for applications in interactive cloths, sensing fabrics, signage and art. In their cross section Bragg fibers feature periodic sequence of layers of two distinct plastics. Under ambient illumination the fibers appear colored due to optical interference in their microstructure. Importantly, no dyes or colorants are used in fabrication of such fibers, thus making the fibers resistant to color fading. Additionally, Bragg fibers guide light in the low refractive index core by photonic bandgap effect, while uniformly emitting a portion of guided color without the need of mechanical perturbations such as surface corrugation or microbending, thus making such fibers mechanically superior to the standard light emitting fibers. Intensity of side emission is controlled by varying the number of layers in a Bragg reflector. Under white light illumination, emitted color is very stable over time as it is defined by the fiber geometry rather than by spectral content of the light source. Moreover, Bragg fibers can be designed to reflect one color when side illuminated, and to emit another color while transmitting the light. By controlling the relative intensities of the ambient and guided light the overall fiber color can be varied, thus enabling passive color changing textiles. Additionally, by stretching a PBG Bragg fiber, its guided and reflected colors change proportionally to the amount of stretching, thus enabling visually interactive and sensing textiles responsive to the mechanical influence. Finally, we argue that plastic Bragg fibers offer economical solution demanded by textile applications.

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We report several strategies for the fabrication of porous subwavelength fibers using low density Polyethylene plastic for low-loss terahertz light transmission applications. We also characterize transmission losses of the fabricated fibers in terahertz using a novel non-destructive directional coupler method. Within this method a second fiber is translated along the length of the test fiber to probe the power attenuation of a guided mode. The method is especially suitable for measuring transmission losses through short fiber segments, a situation in which standard cutback method is especially difficult to perform. We demonstrate experimentally that introduction of porosity into a subwavelength rod fiber, further reduces its transmission loss by as much as a factor of 10. The lowest fiber loss measured in this work is 0.01 cm(-1) and it is exhibited by the 40% porous subwavelength fiber of diameter 380 microm. For comparison, the loss of a rod-in-the-air subwavelength fiber of a similar diameter was measured to be approximately 0.1 cm(-1), while the bulk loss of a PE plastic used in the fabrication of such fibers is >or= 1 cm(-1). Finally, we present theoretical studies of the optical properties of individual subwavelength fibers and a directional coupler. From these studies we conclude that coupler setup studied in this paper also acts as a low pass filter with a cutoff frequency around 0.3 THz. Considering that the spectrum of a terahertz source used in this work falls off rapidly below 0.25 THz, the reported loss measurements are, thus, the bolometer averages over the approximately 0.25 THz-0.3 THz region.

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