Large-effective-area dispersion-compensating fiber design based on dual-core microstructure

Abstract

We present a microstructure-based dual-core dispersion-compensating fiber (DCF) design for dispersion compensation in long-haul optical communication links. The design has been conceptualized by combining the all-solid dual-core DCF and dispersion-compensating photonic crystal fiber. The fiber design has been analyzed numerically by using a full vectorial finite difference time domain method. We propose a fiber design for narrowband as well as broadband dispersion compensation. In the narrowband DCF design, the fiber exhibits very large negative dispersion of around -42;000 psnm-1 km-1 and a large mode area of 67 μm2. The effects of varying different structural parameters on the dispersion characteristics as well as on the trade-off between full width at half-maximum and dispersion have been investigated. For broadband DCF design, a dispersion value between -860 ps nm-1 km-1 and -200 psnm-1 km-1 is obtained for the entire spectral range of the C band. © 2013 Optical Society of America.