Abstract

Porous fibers have been identified as a means of achieving low losses, low dispersion and high birefringence among THz polymer fibers. By exploiting optical fiber fabrication techniques, two types of THz polymer porous fibers—spider-web and rectangular porous fibers— with 57% and 65% porosity have been fabricated. The effective refractive index measured by terahertz time domain spectroscopy shows a good agreement between the theoretical and experimental results indicating a lower dispersion for THz porous fiber compared to THz microwires. A birefringence of 0.012 at 0.65 THz is also reported for rectangular porous fiber.

© 2009 Optical Society of America

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History
Original Manuscript: June 1, 2009
Manuscript Accepted: July 24, 2009
Revised Manuscript: July 24, 2009
Published: July 29, 2009

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Author Affiliations

Michael Nagel

RWTH Aachen University

Shaghik Atakaramians, Shahraam Afshar V., Heike Ebendorff-Heidepriem, Bernd M. Fischer, Derek Abbott, Tanya M. Monro

The University of Adelaide

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