Perfluorinated polymer photonic crystal fiber

Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) with microscopic air holes that run along the entire fiber length are expected to exhibit various unique properties (e.g. endlessly single mode operation). On the other hand, polymer materials have excellent properties for fabricating PCFs, such as flexibility, ease-of-casing and low cast. In this research, a polymer based photonic crystal fiber (PPCF) is proposed and prepared. At first, a PMMA based PPCF is fabricated by well-known capillary stacking method. Furthermore, this method is applied to a perfluorinated (PF) polymer and the PF-PPCF that satisfies the single-mode condition is tried to be fabricated by two approaches. The first one is to control the hole size by flowing N₂ gas into the capillaries, and by controlling the heat drawing temperature and tension. Another is to decrease the core diameter. As a result, the PF-PPCF is successfully fabricated, and light propagation in its core is experimentally confirmed for the first time. Finally, it is indicated that the preparation of single mode PF-PPCF is possible by the methods proposed in this research.