Optical characteristics of polymer-infused microstructured optical fiber using an analytical field model

Infiltration of functional materials into the voids of microstructured optical fibers (MOFs) can provide response under different physical fields leading to tunable propagation properties of the MOFs, for the promising all-in-fiber optical components. In this article, using an analytical field model, we study the light guiding properties of MOFs with triangular lattice of voids infiltrated with polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) elastomer, which has been selected owing to its good optical and mechanical properties. We demonstrate that infiltration of voids with PDMS can lead to tune the modal properties of MOF over the wavelength ranging from 500-1800 nm for different normalized void ratios. Further, we elucidate that the effective mode area can be tailored to any desired value between 38-264 μm2 at the telecommunication wavelength of interest by reducing the relative void ratios, which can be useful in the domain of fiber laser applications. Comparisons with numerical simulation results based on the full vector finite-difference (FD) method and the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method have been included to further fine tuning of the design parameters.