Characterisation of longitudinal variation in photonic crystal fibre

Abstract: We present a method by which the degree of longitudinal variation in photonic crystal fibre (PCF) may be characterised through seeded four-wave mixing (FWM). Using an iterative numerical reconstruction, we created a model PCF that displays similar FWM phasematching properties across all measured length scales. Our results demonstrate that the structure of our PCF varies by less than 1% and that the characteristic length of the variations is approximately 15 cm.