Dispersion-flattened photonic crystal fiber with large effective area and low confinement loss

A photonic crystal fiber (PCF) can realize a flat dispersion over a wide wavelength range that cannot be realized with a conventional single-mode fiber. However, the confinement loss tends to increase in a conventional dispersion-flattened PCF (DF-PCF) that has uniform air holes. In this paper, a novel PCF that has two cladding layers with different effective indices is proposed. The authors numerically show that the proposed PCF can achieve an ultralow dispersion variation of less than 0.8 ps/nm/spl middot/km in all telecommunication bands, with both a large effective area greater than 100 /spl mu/m/sup 2/ and a low confinement loss less than 0.01 dB/km.