Design and characterization of single-mode holey fibers with low bending losses

As the fiber-to-the-home network construction increased, optical fiber cables are demanded to be easier to handle and require less space. Under this situation, a single mode fiber (SMF) permitting small bending radius is strongly requested. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a novel type of bending-insensitive single-mode holey fiber that has a doped core and two layers of holes with different air-hole diameters. The fiber has a mode field diameter of 9.3 mu m at 1.55 mu m and a cutoff wavelength below 1.1 mu m, and shows a bending loss of 0.011 dB/turn at 1.55 mu m for a bending radius of 5 mm and a low splice loss of 0.08 dB per fusion-splicing to a conventional SMF. (C) 2005 Optical Society of America.