Design, in-house fabrication and analysis of suspended core silica-strand photonic crystal fiber

In this article we report the realization of photonic crystal fibers having silica-strand core suspended in air-cladding fabricated using our in-house `stack & draw' technology. The fiber has high potential as a sensing probe in many applications. The fibers' air cladding can be filled with a given sensing fluid which would modify the characteristics of propagating light in presence of the external influence. A realistic analysis of the fabricated structure is also presented to estimate the key modal properties, namely, mode-field area, GVD, and nonlinearity.