Engineering modes in optical fibers with metamaterial

Abstract

In this paper, we report a preliminary theoretical study on optical fibers with fine material inclusions whose geometrical inhomogeneity is almost indistinguishable by the operating wavelength. We refer to such fibers as metamaterial optical fibers, which can conceptually be considered as an extension from the previously much publicized microstructured optical fibers. Metamaterials can have optical properties not obtainable in naturally existing materials, including artificial anisotropy as well as graded material properties. Therefore, incorporation of metamaterial in optical fiber designs can produce a new range of fiber properties. With a particular example, we will show how mode discrimination can be achieved in a multimode Bragg fiber with the help of metamaterial. We also look into the mean field theory as well as Maxwell-Garnett theory for homogenizing a fine metamaterial structure to a homogeneous one. The accuracies of the two homogenization approaches are compared with full-structure calculation.

Keywords

optical fiber / metamaterial / Bragg fiber / mode discrimination

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Danish Council for Strategic Research through the Strategic Program for Young Researchers (Grant No. 2117-05-0037).

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg