A large-mode-area neodymium-doped silicate photonic bandgap fiber was theoretically designed and experimentally demonstrated. The relative index step between the high-index rods and the background glass was ～0.5%, which is the lowest cladding index difference reported on rare-earth-doped all-solid photonic bandgap fibers to our knowledge. An output power of 3.6 W with a slope efficiency of 31% was obtained for a 100-cm-long fiber.

High flatness, wide bandwidth, and high-coherence properties of supercontinuum (SC) generation in fibers are crucial in many applications. It is challenging to achieve SC spectra in a combination of the properties, since special dispersion profiles are required, especially when pump pulses with duration over 100 fs are employed. We propose an all-solid microstructured fiber composed only of hexagonal glass elements. The optimized fiber possesses an ultraflat all-normal dispersion profile, covering a wide wavelength interval of approximately 1.55 μm. An SC spectrum spanning from approximately 1030 to 2030 nm (corresponding to nearly one octave) with flatness <3 dB is numerically generated in the fiber with 200 fs pump pulses at 1.55 μm. The results indicate that the broadband ultraflat SC sources can be all-fiber and miniaturized due to commercially achievable 200-fs fiber lasers. Moreover, the SC pulses feature high coherence and a single pulse in the time domain, which can be compressed to 13.9-fs pulses with high quality even for simple linear chirp compensation. The Fourier-limited pulse duration of the spectrum is 3.19 fs, corresponding to only 0.62 optical cycles.

We propose a novel waveguide design of a polarization-maintaining few mode fiber (PM-FMF) supporting ≥10 non-degenerate modes, utilizing a central circular air hole and a circumjacent elliptical-ring core. The structure endows a new degree of freedom to adjust the birefringence of all the guided modes, including the fundamental polarization mode. Numerical simulations demonstrate that, by optimizing the air hole and elliptical-ring core, a PM-FMF supporting 10 distinctive polarization modes has been achieved, and the effective index difference Δneff between the adjacent guided modes could be kept larger than 1.32×10 4 over the whole C+L band. The proposed fiber structure can be flexibly tailored to support an even larger number of modes in PM-FMF (14-mode PM-FMF has been demonstrated as an example), which can be readily applicable to a scalable mode division multiplexing system.

Understanding bend loss in single-ring hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) is becoming of increasing importance as the fibers enter practical applications. While purely numerical approaches are useful, there is a need for a simpler analytical formalism that provides physical insight and can be directly used in the design of PCFs with low bend loss. We show theoretically and experimentally that a wavelength-dependent critical bend radius exists below which the bend loss reaches a maximum, and that this can be calculated from the structural parameters of a fiber using a simple analytical formula. This allows straightforward design of single-ring PCFs that are bend-insensitive for specified ranges of bend radius and wavelength. It also can be used to derive an expression for the bend radius that yields optimal higher-order mode suppression for a given fiber structure.

We propose a temperature-insensitive refractive index (RI) fiber sensor based on a Mach–Zehnder interferometer. The sensor with high sensitivity and a robust structure is fabricated by splicing a short photonic crystal fiber (PCF) between two single-mode fibers, where two microcavities are formed at both junctions because of the collapse of the PCF air holes. The microcavity with a larger equatorial dimension can excite higher-order cladding modes, so the sensor presents a high RI sensitivity, which can reach 244.16 nm/RIU in the RI range of 1.333–1.3778. Meanwhile it has a low temperature sensitivity of 0.005 nm/°C in the range of 33°C–360°C.