Novel Polarization Splitter Based on Highly Birefringent Dual-core Photonic Crystal Fibers with Hollow Ring Defects

Abstract

A novel polarization splitter based on photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) is proposed in this paper. It is a new kind of highly birefringent dual-core PCFs which the orthogonal polarization modes with dissimilar coupling lengths is separated from each other easily. Compared to the traditional methods achieving high birefringence, the designed highly birefringent PCFs uses hollow ring defects in its one direction and then breaks the structural symmetry of PCFs. And also the design or fabrication limitations for the PCF-based polarization splitter can be partly overcome by this new type of PCFs. The transmission properties, the coupling lengths for the two orthogonal polarizations and the performance of the proposed polarization splitter are investigated respectively and analyzed numerically. The results show that it is possible to obtain a 0.50-mm long polarization splitter. Its bandwidth is about 30.6 nm or 16.0 nm as the splitting ratio is better than -10 dB or -20 dB.