Recent advances in the development of holey optical fibers based on sulfide glasses

International audience; Microstructured optical fibers as new optical objects have been developed in the recent past years, firstly from silica glass and then from other oxide glasses such as tellurite or different heavy cations oxide glasses. However very few results have been reported concerning non-oxide glasses and more particularly chalcogenide glasses. In a photonic crystal fiber the arrangement of air holes along the transverse section of the fiber around a solid glassy core leads to unique optical properties, such as for example broadband single-mode guidance, adjustable dispersion, nonlinear properties. Since the effective modal area is adjustable thanks to geometrical parameters, chalcogenide microstructured fibers with small mode area are of interest for nonlinear components because of the intrinsic non linearity of chalcogenide glasses, several order of magnitude above these of the reference silica glass (100 to 1000 times the non linearity of silica glass). On the other hand, chalcogenide holey fibers with large mode area are of interest for infrared power transmission, in a wavelength range out of reach of silica fibers, and more particularly in the 3-5 mu m atmospheric window. The aim of this paper is to present more specifically the recent results that have been achieved in the elaboration, light guidance and characterization of photonic crystal fibers from the sulfide Ge20Ga5Sb10S65 glass, which presents a large transparency window from 600 nm to 11 mu m.