Tunable Broadband In-Fiber Polarizer Based on Photonic Liquid Crystal Fiber

Abstract

In this paper a tunable broad-band polarizer based on the photonic crystal fiber (PCF) filled with liquid crystal (LC) is presented. Host PCF is made of glass with 1.518 refractive index and ordinary refractive index of the LCs is lower than glass index. Numerical simulations have proven that by changing LC orientation from planar to transverse a broad-band single-polarization guidance is possible: for planar orientation of LC molecules both polarizations are index-guided, whereas for transverse orientation only one polarization is index-guided. Also some initial experimental results are included showing that polarization dependent losses and phase birefringence can be tuned with transverse electric field.

Keywords:

• fiber optics
• liquid crystals
• photonic crystal fibers
• polarization

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education and Science of Poland under grant N517 0164 33 and partially by Network of Excellence in Micro-Optics NEMO.