Supercontinuum generation at 1.55 μm in a silicon nanowire embedded photonic crystal fiber

In this paper, we design an elliptical silicon nanowire embedded photonic crystal fiber (SN-PCF) using fully vectorial finite element method. Further, we analyze the various optical properties, namely, waveguide dispersion, birefringence, fractional power inside the core and effective nonlinearity by varying the ellipticity for a wide range of wavelengths from 0.8 to 1.8 μm. The proposed structure exhibits a high birefringence of 0.4815 for a small ellipticity of 0.3 at a longer wavelength of 1.8 μm. Besides, we investigate the evolution of supercontinuum at 1.55 μm wavelength for an input pulse width of 25 fs by varying the peak power of the input pulse as well as length of the SN-PCF. The numerical results corroborate that the proposed SN-PCF provides a wider supercontinuum bandwidth for a high input power within a few mm length (2mm) of fiber. The findings of this work may be useful in ultrahigh-resolution optical coherence tomography and optical communication systems.