In a DFG-funded collaboration with M. Schmidt, N. Ganzow and P. St. J. Russell of Erlangen’s Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light (MPL), we have been studying the process of filling various low-melting glasses into silica microcapillaries and photonic crystal fibers (PCF). Within this scope, photonic band gap guidance was recently demonstrated for chalcogenide-silica PCFs by Granzow et al. (N. Granzow, P. Uebel, M. A. Schmidt, A. S. Tverjanovich, L. Wondraczek, P. St. J. Russell: Bandgap guidance in hybrid chalcogenide-silica photonic crystal fibers. Opt. Letters 36, 2432-2434 (2011)). This work was now highlighted in Nature Photonics (Nature Photonics 5, 463 (2011)). We believe that these devices will have great potential for, e.g., the fabrication of ultra-broadband supercontinuum light sources.
SEM-microgaph of the crosssection of a silica PCF device with tellurite-filled strands