Highly birefringent hexagonal porous core photonic crystal fiber for polarization maintaining integrated THz-photonics applications.

For high birefringence photonic crystal fibres (PCF) operating in terahertz (THz) regime, an outstanding model of slotted porous core with triangular lattice-based hexagonal shape cladding has been presented in this study. In this proposed THz-PCF, a five-layer circular air holes arranged in hexagon configuration have been placed in the cladding area, and five rectangular air holes have been positioned in core region for investigating the THz-PCF in polarization maintaining applications. The asymmetrical rectangular slots in core area creates difference between x and y polarized THz waves to offer high birefringence. The compact geometry of hexagonal structure in cladding offers more useful power confinement. The designed PCF offers high birefringence of 0.0866, low effective material loss of 0.0786 cm−1, core power fraction of 42.7%, less confinement loss of 0.02598 cm−1, low dispersion of 0.0963 ps/THz/cm and very less effective area of 0.03 µm2 in a broad frequency range of 0.1–2.3 THz, according to the Finite Element Method based simulation results in COMSOL Multiphysics software. These features enable the proposed PCF to be a better choice for numerous applications like polarization filtering, sensing, short distance communication, etc. in THz photonic integrated circuits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]