Robust Optical Fiber Using Single Negative Metamaterial Cladding

We introduce the idea of optical fibers made up of single negative metamaterial photonic crystal cladding with zero effective phase bandgap. Fiber characteristics are analyzed both at sub-wavelength and non sub-wavelength crystal dimension by varying cladding thickness and core radius. We find that in both cases they are robust with respect to incident angle, polarization of the light, crystal constant, and cladding irregularities. The fiber is found to behave like a step index fiber but the guided modes are leaky like Bragg fiber. It is shown that a fixed cladding thickness produces fixed loss around impedance matching frequency irrespective of crystal constant.