Design of a photonic quasi-crystal fiber for the generation of few cycle laser pulses

In this work, we design a novel, index guiding, silica core photonic quasi-crystal fiber (PQF) of 6, 8 and 10-folds for a wide range of operating wavelengths from 0.6 to 3 mu m. Further, we explore the various optical properties, namely, birefringence, dispersion, and nonlinearity for all the folds. Of all the folds, 10-fold PQF provides a low dispersion of -2.4765 ps(2) km(-1), a high nonlinearity of 22 W-1 km(-1), admissible level of a less birefringence of 3.8 x 10(-5) and confinement loss of 0.30446 dB/cm at 1.06 mu m. These optical properties form the crucial requirements for the generation of few cycle laser pulses. Besides, we calculate the quality factor (Q) of the fundamental mode for all the folds and report a maximum quality factor of 0.9961 for the 10-fold PQF at 1.06 mu m wavelength. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.