Abstract
The study reports on the design and performance of two air-filled and two partial ethanol-filled photonic crystal fiber (PCF) structures with a tetra core for supercontinuum generation. The PCFs are nonlinear with ultra-flattened zero dispersion. Holes with smaller areas are used to create a tetra-core PCF structure. Ethanol is filled in the holes of smaller area while the larger holes of cladding region are air-filled. Optical properties including dispersion, effective mode area, confinement loss, normalized frequency, and nonlinear coefficient of the designed PCF structures are investigated via full vector finite difference time domain (FDTD) method. A PCF structure with lead silicate as wafer exhibits significantly better results than a PCF structure with silica as wafer. However, both structures report dispersion at a telecommunication wavelength corresponding to 1.55 μm. Furthermore, the PCF structure with lead silicate as wafer exhibits a very high nonlinear coefficient corresponding to 1375 W−1km−1 at the same wavelength. This scheme can be used for optical communication systems and in optical devices by exploiting the principle of nonlinearity.