Abstract

Transparent mid-infrared non-silica fibers made of highly nonlinear glasses, such as tellurite [1, 2], bismuth oxide based and chalcogenide glasses, are required as the medium for generating mid-IR nonlinear phenomena. Among these tellurite fibers provides lowest losses over a wide bandwidth, making those attractive for the low threshold broadband devices [3]. The fiber dispersion reported in [1, 2] have one zero dispersion wavelength (ZDWL) in the communication band. Here, we present the design, dispersion calculations and tailoring, and parametric gain calculations for the composite tellurite fluorophosphate glass fiber (structure shown in Fig. 1). We show that it is possible to design the zero flattened dispersion fiber or the fiber providing two ZDWLs in the communication band, which in turn can generate broadband parametric amplification. We study the effect of dimensional parameters of the fiber on the dispersion. Such dispersion curve management is highly useful for generating the non-linear processes including four wave mixing and parametric amplification. The composite fiber introduced here has the advantage of easy handling over the fiber tapers or the air cladding nanofibers. The thermal properties of the tellurite and the fluorophosphate glasses match, depicting the feasibility of the fabrication of the fiber under controlled environment.

© 2009 IEEE