ANNULAR CORE PHOTONIC CRYSTAL FIBER

Generating annular beams using simple and affordable devices

• The global market for photonic crystals should grow from $12.2 billion in 2018 to $31.4 billion by 2023 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.8% for the period of 2018-2023 (BCC Research)
• There is a burgeoning transformation in the optics & photonics world, which so far had been driven by Gaussian light beams
• Increasingly, scientists and engineers are finding new applications that benefit from a beam of light that has the shape of a single ring
• Recently, annular beams have shown to enhance the quality and control over the laser processing of materials, have revolutionized the field of high resolution optical microscopy (vindicated by a 2014 Nobel prize)
• Annular beams promise to keep the Internet and Information Age growing by extending the data-carrying capacity in optical fibers and opening new quantum information capabilities
• Current methods of generating and delivering such annular beams rely on a complex arrangement of bulky and expensive optical components that currently inhibits industrial adoption
• To address this issue, a novel type of optical fiber, called “annular-core photonic crystal fiber” (AC-PCF), has been developed

• The proposed AC-PCF resembles a standard photonic crystal fiber where holes of diameter “d” are separated by a pitch “∧”
• Careful adjustment of these parameters and ensemble geometry allows for a guiding regime where modes with radial order m=1 are exclusively supported by the fiber at all input wavelengths
• A proper design makes it possible to control the non-linearities of the fiber
• Demonstration prototype available
• Technology developed by Prof. Bora Ung (Department of Electrical Engineering, École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS))

• Design guarantees a strictly mono-annular output beam over an infinite wavelength span (endlessly mono-radial order)
• Design eliminates the need for bulky and expensive optics to generate annular beams
• Process allows for cleaner edges and minimal induced material stress in material cutting & drilling applications
• Support for orbital angular momentum useful for space division multiplexing (SDM) and high data transmission capacity

• Super-resolution microscopy applications
• Laser material processing
• Space-division multiplexing in telecoms

• PCT CA2017,000157
• US patent application 16,310,689
• CA patent application 3,029,065
• Technology available for licensing

École de Technologie supérieure (ÉTS)

Bora Ung

Bora Ung, Professor, Electrical Engineering Department

Prof. Ung completed a B.Eng and M.Sc in physics at Laval University with specialisation in optics-photonics. He has a Ph.D in Engineering physics (2012) from the Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal in the development of novel microstructured optical fibers. As a postdoctoral fellow at Laval, he performed research in the transmission of inhomogeneous optical beams and worked on multi-material textile fibers. Since September 2014 he is professor at the Electrical engineering department of the École de technologie supérieure and member of the strategic cluster Center for Optics, Photonics and Lasers (COPL). He heads the Photonic Innovations Lab (phi-lab)