Design and characterization of highly negative dispersion compensating photonic crystal fiber

Abstract

Photonic Crystal Fiber (PCF) has emerged as a revolutionary advancement in optical fiber technology, offering superior optical properties for highspeed, long-haul communication systems. The increasing demand for highspeed and long-distance optical communication necessitates effective management of different fiber impairments like dispersion, attenuation, nonlinearity, and confinement loss to mitigate signal degradation. Among these impairments, dispersion is one of the major limitations that limits the fiber efficiency including distance and bandwidth. This research focuses on the design and characterization of a highly negative dispersion compensating PCF to address chromatic dispersion issues in optical fiber communication. Besides, increased signal power causes significant system performance degradation due to nonlinear fiber effects, such as inelastic scattering and intensity dependent refractive index changes. Dispersion management is an effective technique for mitigating these nonlinear impairments, optimizing parameters like net residual dispersion (NRD) In this study, a novel PCF is proposed for dispersion compensation. The guiding characteristics of the proposed fiber are analyzed using the finite element method (FEM) with a perfectly matched layer boundary condition. The optical properties of the PCF, including chromatic dispersion, group velocity dispersion (GVD), nonlinearity, and third order dispersion (TOD), are examined over a wavelength range of 1340 nm to 1640 nm. Simulation results indicate that at an operational wavelength of 1550 nm, the proposed PCF exhibits a high negative dispersion of −2367.10 ps/(nm.km), a GVD of 3018.55 ps2/km, a third order dispersion of −574.23 ps3/km, a very low confinement loss of 0.20 dB/km and a nonlinear coefficient of 91.11 W-1km-1. The proposed PCF effectively compensates for the dispersion of standard single-mode fibers (SMFs), making it a strong candidate for long-distance, high-bit-rate optical communication applications. The study also evaluates the network implementation of the proposed dispersion compensating fiber in a long-distance optical transmission system. Performance metrics, including bit error rate (BER) and quality factor, are analyzed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the PCF based dispersion compensation strategy. The findings suggest that the proposed PCF significantly improves signal integrity by reducing pulse broadening and nonlinear impairments. Overall, the proposed design offers a promising solution for broadband dispersion compensation in wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) and dense WDM (DWDM) optical networks. The optimized PCF structure enhances transmission efficiency, and ensures robust signal propagation over extended distances. Future research will focus on experimental validation and further optimization of the proposed structure for real world optical network deployments.