Highly birefringent polymer terahertz fiber with honeycomb cladding

TL;DR

This paper proposes two novel highly birefringent polymer terahertz fibers with honeycomb cladding and elliptical air holes, demonstrating high birefringence and low loss, which improve THz wave guidance and reduce material absorption effects.

Contribution

Introduction of two new polymer THz fibers with honeycomb cladding and elliptical air holes, achieving high birefringence and low confinement loss for improved THz transmission.

Findings

Fiber 2 achieves birefringence > 0.022 and loss of 0.01 dB/m

Mode power trapped in air holes reduces polymer absorption loss

Guiding loss is significantly lower than solid-core fibers

Abstract

Two highly birefringent polymer terahertz (THz) fibers were proposed in this paper, which were formed with honeycomb cladding and some elliptical air holes in the fiber core. The losses and mode birefringence for two different fibers are investigated by finite-different time-domain method. The results show that fiber 2 can achieve both high birefringence (larger than 0.022) and low confinement loss (0.01 dB/m) in a wide THz frequency range. Moreover, compared with a round solid-core fiber, guiding loss of the THz fiber caused by polymer material absorption can be reduced effectively as a part of the mode power is trapped in the air holes.