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.
Propagation characteristics of photonic crystal fibers selectively filled with ionic liquid
