A photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with high relative sensitivity was designed and investigated for the detection of chemical analytes in the terahertz (THz) regime. To ease the complexity, an extremely simple cladding employing four struts is adopted, which forms a rectangular shaped core area for filling with analytes. Results of enormous simulations indicate that a minimum 87.8% relative chemical sensitivity with low confinement and effective material absorption losses can be obtained for any kind of analyte, e.g., HCN (1.26), water (1.33), ethanol (1.35), KCN (1.41), or cocaine (1.50), whose refractive index falls in the range of 1.2 to 1.5. Besides, the PCF can also achieve high birefringence (∼0.01), low and flat dispersion, a large effective modal area, and a large numerical aperture within the investigated frequency range from 0.5 to 1.5 THz. We believe that the proposed PCF can be applied to chemical sensing of liquid and THz systems requiring wide-band polarization-maintaining transmission and low attenuation.
AbstractA novel photonic crystal fiber (PCF) based on TOPAS, consisting only rectangular slots is presented and analyzed in this paper. The PCF promises not only an extremely low effective material loss (EML) but also a flattened dispersion over a broad frequency range. The modal characteristics of the proposed fiber have been thoroughly investigated using finite element method. The fiber confirms a low EML of 0.009 to 0.01 cm−1 in the frequency range of 0.77–1.05 THz and a flattened dispersion of 0.22±0.01 ps/THz/cm. Besides, some other significant characteristics like birefringence, single mode operation and confinement loss have also been inspected. The simplicity of the fiber makes it easily realizable using the existing fabrication technologies. Thus it is anticipated that the new fiber has the potential to ensure polarization preserving transmission of terahertz signals and to serve as an efficient medium in the terahertz frequency range.
Design and Characterization of Porous Core Polarization Maintaining Photonic Crystal Fiber for THz Guidance