Design of Angular-offset Interstitial-Tube- Assisted Hollow-Core Fibers with Ultrahigh Mode Purity and Ultralow Loss

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel angular offset technique in interstitial-tube-assisted hollow-core fibers to significantly improve mode purity by effectively suppressing higher-order modes while maintaining ultralow fundamental-mode loss.

Contribution

It proposes a new HOM-control mechanism using angular offset in IT-DNANF, enabling rapid higher-order mode suppression without compromising fundamental-mode loss.

Findings

Achieves higher-order mode loss >1 dB/m while maintaining fundamental-mode loss <0.05 dB/km.

Demonstrates phase matching-induced strong coupling for HOM suppression.

Provides a manufacturable design approach for ultralow-loss, high-purity hollow-core fibers.

Abstract

Antiresonant hollow-core fibres (AR-HCFs) have recently reached attenuation far below the Rayleigh-scattering limit of silica, but their inherently multimode nature remains a major challenge for practical systems requiring high modal purity. In particular, suppressing higher-order modes (HOMs) at the 1 dB/m level while maintaining sub-0.1 dB/km fundamental-mode (FM) loss is difficult because conventional filtering strategies rely on tuning nested-tube dimensions, a design freedom that becomes increasingly restricted in the ultralow-loss regime. Here, we propose a new HOM-control mechanism in an interstitial-tube-assisted double nested anti-resonant nodeless fiber (IT-DNANF) by introducing angular offset of the interstitial tubes. Instead of using nested cavities as the primary tuning element, the proposed approach exploits the gap region between adjacent cladding tubes as a leakage-adjacent modal-control interface. Numerical simulations show that the offset increases both FM and HOM losses, but with a substantially stronger sensitivity for HOMs, leading to rapid enhancement of differential modal loss. Furthermore, when the gap-region FM is tuned into phase matching with the core HOM, strong coupling to a high-leakage state is induced, resulting in a pronounced HOM-loss peak. Using the practical criterion of HOM losslarger than 1 dB/m, we identify optimized IT-DNANF designs that achieve rapid HOM stripping while maintaining FM loss below 0.05 dB/km at 1550 nm. This work establishes angular offset as a physically distinct and manufacturability-friendly degree of freedom for mode purification in ultralow-loss hollow-core fibres.