Lara SCOLARI¹, Lei WEI¹, Sebastian GAUZA², Shin-Tson WU², and Anders BJARKLEV¹

¹DTU Fotonik, Department of Photonics Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, Ørsteds Plads 343, DK-2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark
²College of Optics and Photonics, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL 32816, U.S.A.

(Received May 19, 2010; Accepted October 14, 2010)

We infiltrate a perdeuterated liquid crystal with a reduced infrared absorption in a photonic crystal fiber. The H atoms of this liquid crystal were substituted with D atoms in order to move the vibration bands which cause absorption loss to longer wavelengths and therefore reduce the absorption in the spectral range of 1–2 μm. We achieve in the middle of the near-infrared transmission bandgap the lowest loss (about 1 dB) ever reported for this kind of devices.

Key words: photonic bandgap fiber, liquid crystals, absorption loss, all-in-fiber devices, tunability, near-infrared region