A new concept of photonic crystal fiber(PCF) with high nonlinearity and flattened dispersion was designed. The PCF structure is indeed a hexagon lattice. The bigger air holes in the outer rings are used to confine the light field into the core region for enhancing the nonlinearity. The flattened dispersion can be achieved by adjusting the diameters of six smaller air holes in the first ring, and six micro air holes are inserted between smaller air holes for higher nonlinearity and the better flattened dispersion. By optimizing the size of the smaller and micro holes, the PCF can reach to high nonlinearity of 23.3 W-1·km-1 and the low dispersion of 51.32 ps/(nm·km) with the fluctuation range of 0.98 ps/(nm·km), which is within the wavelength range of 1 400 nm to 1 900 nm. The designed PCF can be used in important applications in realizing the Raman soliton self-frequency shift(RSSFS).
Frequency-tunable microwave signal generation is proposed and experimentally demonstrated with a dual-wavelength single-longitudinal-mode(SLM) erbium-doped fiber ring laser based on a digital Opto-DMD processor and four-wave mixing(FWM) in a high-nonlinear photonic crystal fiber(PCF). The high-nonlinear PCF is employed for the generation of the FWM to obtain stable and uniform dual-wavelength oscillation. Two different short passive sub-ring cavities in the main ring cavity serve as mode filters to make SLM lasing. The two lasing wavelengths are electronically selected by loading different gratings on the Opto-DMD processor controlled with a computer. The wavelength spacing can be smartly adjusted from 0.165 nm to 1.08 nm within a tuning accuracy of 0.055 nm. Two microwave signals at 17.23 GHz and 27.47 GHz are achieved. The stability of the microwave signal is discussed. The system has the ability to generate a 137.36-GHz photonic millimeter signal at room temperature.
