Theoretical proposal of a low-loss wide-bandwidth silicon photonic crystal fiber for supporting 30 orbital angular momentum modes.

Abstract

We propose a novel four-ring hollow-core silicon photonic crystal fiber (PCF), and we systematically and theoretically investigate the properties of their vector modes. Our PCF can stably support 30 OAM states from the wavelength of 1.5 μm to 2.4 μm, with a large effective refractive index separation of above 1×10-4. The confinement loss is less than 1×10-9 dB/m at the wavelength of 1.55 μm, and the average confinement loss is less than 1×10-8 dB/m from the wavelength of 1.2 μm to 2.4 μm. Moreover, the curve of the dispersion tends to flatten as the wavelength increases. In addition, we comparably investigate PCFs with different hole spacing. This kind of fiber structure will be a potential candidate for high-capacity optical fiber communications and OAM sensing applications using fibers.