Soft Glass Equiangular Spiral Photonic Crystal Fiber for Supercontinuum Generation

An equiangular spiral photonic crystal fiber (ES-PCF) design in soft glass is presented that has high nonlinearity ( gamma > 5250 W^-1 middot km^-1 at 1064 nm and gamma > 2150 W^-1 middot km^-1 at 1550 nm) with a low and flat dispersion (D ~ 0.8 ps/kmmiddotnm and dispersion slope ~ -0.7 ps/km middot nm² at 1060 nm). The design inspired by nature is characterized by a full-vectorial finite element method. The ES-PCF presented improves over the mode confinement of triangular core designs and dispersion control of conventional hexagonal PCF, combining the advantages of both designs; it can be an excellent candidate for generating supercontinuum pumped at 1.06 mum.