Flexible tube lattice fibers for terahertz applications.

In this paper a flexible hollow core waveguide for the terahertz spectral range is demonstrated. Its cladding is composed of a circular arrangement of dielectric tubes surrounded by a heat-shrink jacket that allows the fiber to be flexible. Characterization of straight samples shows that the hollow core allows the absorption caused by the polymethylmethacrylate tubes of the cladding to be reduced by 31 times at 0.375 THz and 272 times at 0.828 THz with respect to the bulk material, achieving losses of 0.3 and 0.16 dB/cm respectively. Bending loss is also experimentally measured and compared to numerical results. For large bending radii bending loss scales as Rb-2, whereas for small bending radii additional resonances between core and cladding appear. The transmission window bandwidth is also shown to shrink as the bending radius is reduced. An analytical model is proposed to predict and quantify both of these bending effects.

Extra loss due to Fano resonances in inhibited coupling fibers based on a lattice of tubes.

Confinement loss of inhibited coupling fibers with a cladding composed of a lattice of tubes of various shapes is theoretically and numerically investigated. Both solid core and hollow core are taken into account. It is shown that in case of polygonal shaped tubes, confinement loss is affected by extra loss due to Fano resonances between core modes and cladding modes with high spatial dependence. This explains why hollow core Kagome fibers exhibit much higher confinement loss with respect to tube lattice fibers and why hypocycloid core cladding interfaces significantly reduce fiber loss. Moreover it is shown that tube deformations, due for example to fabrication process, affect fiber performances. A relationship between the number of polygon sides and the spectral position of the extra loss is found. This suggests general guide lines for the design and fabrication of fibers free of Fano resonance in the spectral range of interest.