Characterization of erbium doped photonic crystal fiber

Abstract

Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) are a new emerging research area, and have been undergoing rapid development in recent years due to their unique and excellent optical properties and features. Studies on the characteristics of various types of PCFs have been reported. However, characterization on erbium-doped PCF has not previously been investigated. Therefore, in this paper, we have modeled an erbium-doped core PCF which has 7 rings of hexagonal air holes. The PCF structure, with a perfectly matched layer (PML), is modeled and simulated using Finite Element Method (FEM) via COMSOL software. The PML is optimized by varying the radius and thickness of the layer. Modal properties of the PCF have been investigated in terms of its effective index of the supported fundamental mode, confinement loss and thickness of the perfectly matched layer. This erbium-doped PCF has a confinement loss of 1.0E-6 at 1500 nm and a maximum effective refractive index of 1.476. This paper gathers useful data, which could be used for studying the characteristics of a PCF.