Heptagonal Photonic Crystal Fiber for Dispersion Compensation with a Very Low Confinement Loss

Abstract: This paper presents a photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with heptagonal core and heptagonal cladding for dispersion compensation. Different optical properties of the suggested PCF are explored using the finite element method (FEM). The proposed dispersion compensating PCF (DC-PCF) exhibits a very large negative chromatic dispersion of $-940 ps/(nm-km)$ at $1550 nm$ wavelength. The overall dispersion of the DC-PCF is $-420.1$ to $-1160 ps/(nm-km)$ in the wavelength range of $1390$ to $1700 nm$ ($310 nm$ band). The relative dispersion slope is $0.0036 nm^{-1}$ which is a perfect match with the standard single mode fibers. Moreover, it exhibits a very low confinement loss of about $10^{-5} dB/km$ and low nonlinearity of $45 W^{-1}km^{-1}$ at $1550 nm$ wavelength. Since the suggested DC-PCF has very high negative dispersion and low nonlinearity, it can be a potential candidate for broadband dispersion compensation in fiber-optic communication.