Characterisation of longitudinal variation in photonic crystal fibre

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to characterize the longitudinal variation in photonic crystal fibers using seeded four-wave mixing, enabling detailed modeling of fiber uniformity and variation length scales.

Contribution

A novel iterative numerical reconstruction technique for quantifying and modeling longitudinal variations in photonic crystal fibers.

Findings

Structure varies by less than 1%.

Variation length scale is approximately 15 cm.

Method accurately models FWM phasematching properties.

Abstract

We present a method by which the degree of longitudinal variation in photonic crystal fibre (PCF) may be characterised through seeded four-wave mixing (FWM). Using an iterative numerical reconstruction, we created a model PCF that displays similar FWM phasematching properties across all measured length scales. Our results demonstrate that the structure of our PCF varies by less than 1% and that the characteristic length of the variations is approximately 15 cm.