Design and analysis of thermally tunable liquid crystal filled hybrid photonic crystal fiber coupler

We propose a novel tunable photonic crystal fiber (PCF) coupler scheme, that the light is coupled between a total internal reflection (TIR) guiding core and a photonic bandgap (PBG) guiding core. By introducing the thermo-optic responsive nematic liquid crystals (NLC) into the air holes around the PBG core, the hybrid PCF based coupler exhibits enhanced thermal tunability. The thermo-optical characteristics of the proposed coupler are numerically studied using finite element method (FEM) and beam propagation method (BPM). The proposed design can find promising applications in filtering and sensing devices.