Highly birefringent photonic crystal fibers with near-zero dispersion at 1550 nm wavelength

This paper presents highly birefringent photonic crystal fibers with simultaneously near-zero dispersion and low confinement losses. The finite difference time domain method with anisotropic perfectly matched layer boundaries is used as the simulation software. According to simulation, it is shown that photonic crystal fibers with hybrid cladding and artificial defects along one of the orthogonal axes sufficiently results in a very high birefringence of the order 10^?2 which is two orders of magnitude higher than that of the conventional polarization maintaining fibers. Such a fiber also assumes both near-zero dispersion and low confinement losses at the 1550 nm wavelength. Optical fibers with novel properties such as high birefringence, near-zero dispersion, and low confinement losses may have applications in optical sensing applications.