High-birefringence polarizing fiber with flat cladding

Abstract

This paper presents the theoretical and experimental investigations on polarization characteristics of PANDA fiber with flat cladding. It is theoretically shown that the modal birefringence in the flat-clad fiber is almost the same as that in the circular-clad fiber. The flat-clad PANDA fiber has been fabricated by grinding off the preform cladding on the opposite faces and then drawing with a low furnace temperature. The modal birefringence of the fiber is <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">B = 5.9 \times 10^{-4}</tex> and the separation of the bending loss edges for the two polarization modes is <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">\Delta\upsilon = 0.51</tex> in the normalized frequency. The polarizing region can be tuned from 1.3 to 1.56 μm by varying the fiber-bending diameter from 3.5 to 4.5 cm. A 1.5-m length of polarizing fiber exhibits extinction ratios of 44.9 and 44.4 dB with insertion losses for the guided mode of 0.25 and 0.41 dB at 1.3 and 1.56 μm, respectively.