Special optical fibers and devices for photonics applications in communications and sensing

Hollow fibers, holey fibers and photonic crystal fibers could make superb candidates for the development of new photonic devices due to their unique optical properties; nonlinearities, dispersion, photonic bandgap, and polarization control. In material aspect, various composite hosts are being investigated such as polymer, nonlinear glass, as well as silica. All of these fiber-based solutions has shown strong potential to develop new devices, like parametric amplifiers or integrated and distributed Raman amplifiers, which can be directly applied to new emerging fields such as slow and fast light, highly non linear devices, all-optical processing, ultra-finesensing.