Stress Birefringence in Photonic Crystal Fibers Used in a Novel Field Installable LC Type Optical Connector

Photonic crystal fibers (PCFs) have recently attracted a great deal of interest because of their unique characteristics and many controllable features. They include a wide range of single mode operation, highly birefringent characteristics (~10-3), high-power light transmission, etc. The field-installable LC connectors tend to be of the larger connector types in the fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) distribution units. In these designs, fibers are clamped inside a splice assembly and are stressed within the connector. In this research, we first developed a novel cam-type mechanism for field-use LC connector. The fiber stress was analyzed via a commercial available finite element program. The stress birefringence distributions of single mode fiber and air-silica based PCFs were calculated by stress photoelastic effect. We further studied the effect of air-hole size on the stressinduced birefringence of PCFs. The results indicate that stress-induced birefringence decreases as air-hole size increase. On the other hand, the birefringence increases as applied clamping force increases on the single mode fiber.