Development of Hollow Core Photonic Bandgap Fibres for Telecommunication Applications

Hollow Core Photonic Bandgap Fibres (HC-PBGFs) have been the subject of a resurging interest over the past few years. These fibers are emerging as serious contenders in the race to identify the best solution for next-generation high capacity transmission systems, owing to of their low nonlinearity, ultimate-low signal latency, near ideal match to thulium-doped fibre amplifiers and to the promise to deliver ultralow loss, potentially comparable or even below the level of state-of-the-art standard single mode fibres. Recently, substantial improvements in HC-PBGFs fabrication have been reported and data transmission experiments at both 1.55 µm and 2 µm wavelengths over multi-hundred meter lengths of HC-PBGF have been demonstrated. For these fibres to stand a realistic chance of competing with established and future all-solid transmission fibres, the key challenge is to attain the expected loss reduction over a wide transmission bandwidth. In this work we review recent progress in the development of HC-PBGFs including the realization of fibres with low loss and wide bandwidth through careful engineering of the fibre structure and control of their modal properties, which are paving the way to record-breaking data transmission experiments using mode division multiplexing. The talk will also look at other application areas with significant potential, which may benefit from recent improvements in the fabrication technologies and in the understanding of the properties of these complex fibre waveguides.