Designing a dual-core photonic crystal fiber coupler by means of microfluidic infiltration

We report the results of our study on the role of microfluidic infiltration technique in improving the coupling characteristics of dual-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) couplers. Using the finite element method (FEM), we evaluate the effective mode area, dispersion and coupling parameters of an infiltrated dual-core PCF. We use these parameters to design a compact and reconfigurable coupler by solving a set of coupled generalized nonlinear Schrödinger equations. This approach allows one to obtain wavelength-flattened dispersion characteristics with bandwidth of   in the ITU region, and large walk-off length simply by choosing a suitable infiltrated refractive index. We also demonstrate that under certain conditions one can observe a pulse break-up effect to generate pulse trains with high repetition rate.