Fabrication of chalcogenide glass photonic crystal fibers with mechanical drilling

•Mechanical drilling method was developed to fabricate chalcogenide glasses PCFs.•PCFs with unregularly structures can be prepared with mechanical drilling.•Mechanical drilling can reduce the inhomogeneities at the interfaces of the PCFs.

A mechanical drilling method for the preparation of photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) is presented in this paper. Several PCFs were fabricated with Ge20Sb15S65 chalcogenide glasses, which have high transparency in the mid-infrared (IR) range. The mechanical drilling method has been identified as a powerful tool to prepare fibers with a variety of structures and to increase the transmission of the obtained fibers. For a three-ring PCF, the near-field intensity distribution and the transmission loss were measured. It was found that most of the optical energy is contained in the core of the PCF. The profile of the near-field intensity image shows that the prepared PCF can work with a large mode area, which is important in high-power laser propagation and fiber amplifiers.