Structural Optimization of Air-Guiding Photonic Bandgap Fibers for Realizing Ultimate Low Loss Waveguides

In this paper, we investigate the ultimate low loss property for several realistic core shapes in triangular-type air-guiding photonic bandgap fibers (PBGFs) through a full-vector modal solver based on the finite element method. We show that the surface mode free condition is expressed as a normalized silica-ring thickness T = 0.5 for any core size and the cladding structural parameters, regardless the core radius of the silica-ring is one of the main factors of dominating the surface mode's condition, and the wavelength range of the PBG changes on varying the structural parameters of the cladding. Moreover, we propose a novel type of PBGF without surface mode, which exhibits lower scattering losses caused by surface roughness of the silica-ring in comparison to 19 cell-core PBGFs and suppresses the mode coupling between fundamental-like and higher order modes when compared to 37 cell-core PBGFs.