Abstract

Transmission using photonic-bandgap-guidance (PBG) in a hollow core fiber¹ is attractive because the low nonlinearity, material dispersion and material losses of the fiber are expected to reduce pulse distortion. Hence this field has received a lot of attention recently. PBG fibers are resonant structures and therefore propagation of light should be strongly wavelength dependent. Their waveguide dispersion is expected to be very different from that of total-internal-reflection (TIR) guiding fibers. For example, the dispersion of a 1-D photonic bandgap microstrip structure was measured to vary strongly across the bandgap in the microwave regime.² Studying the waveguide dispersion gives an insight into the physical mechanism of propagation in these fibers and is crucial for any future transmission applications. So far the dispersion has only been modeled theoretically.^3,4 We present the first experimental measurement of chromatic dispersion across multiple bandgaps of a PBG-fiber.

© 2002 Optical Society of America