Recent developments in chalcogenide photonic crystal fibres

In this work the authors present our achievements in the elaboration and optical characterizations of low-losses suspended core optical fibers elaborated from As₂S₃ glass. For preforms elaboration, alternatively to other processes like the classical stack and draw one, we use a mechanical machining. The drawing of these machined preforms into fibers allows reaching a suspended core geometry, in which a ~ 2 μm diameter core is linked to the fiber clad region by three supporting struts. The interest of the mechanical process we use is that the optical quality of the initial glass is not affected during the fabrication of performs. Thus, for the fundamental mode, the losses of the microstructured fibers are equivalent to material losses. Depending on the initial glass synthesis procedure, we obtain different microstructured fibers with background losses between 1 dB/m and actually 0.1 dB/m for the best of them.