Applications of long period gratings in solid core photonic bandgap fibers

Abstract

Solid core photonic bandgap fibres are photonic crystal fibres with a solid core surrounded by high index inclusions. The guidance properties of these fibers are very sensitive to the refractive index of the inclusions, making them widely tunable and making them very promising for sensing applications. Combining these fibers with long period gratings unleashes their full potential, enabling narrow band notch filters tunable over hundreds of nm, refractive index sensors with sensitivity comparable to that of surface plasmon resonance sensors, but also the extraction of the full band diagrams of these bandgap fibres.