Development of Active Fibres with Nanostructured Cores

Nanostructured optical fibres are a new class of fibres with a core composed of various glass nanorods ordered in arbitrary structures. This approach allows the development of very complex fibres with arbitrarily designed freeform structures. If individual rods are much smaller than the wavelength, light interacts with the effective medium of the core rather than with individual rods. Maxwell-Garnett model describes the effective properties of these structures. This way we create an artificial glass material with properties depending on the distribution of individual nanorods. Dispersion, modal and polarization properties of the fibre can be engineered with this method. To form the nanostructured core, usually assembling of about 5–15 thousand rods is required. A stack-and-draw method is used to assemble a preform and draw the final fibres.