Photonic crystal fibers: waveguides of the future?
Photonic crystal fibers are optical fibers with a cross section that consists of a periodic array of airholes with a "defect" that corresponds to the core of the fiber. These recently developed fibers offer far greater flexibility in their light propagation characteristics than standard single-mode fibers. Although initially developed for telecommunications, these fibers have already had a significant impact on other fields such as frequency metrology.
In my talk I will discuss the basic properties of these fibers and how we have characterized them, and I will describe some of their potential applications both in telecommunications and in other fields such as biomedical microscopy.