Photonic Crystal Fiber Technology for Modern Applications: A Comprehensive Review

This review has considered the studies involving the use of PCFs in applications related to their structural, dispersive, tunable, and sensing properties. While the devices considered in this review pursue different goals, from the delivery of an orbital angular momentum mode to the sensing of blood components via terahertz radiation, they all employ the same basic design parameter of PCFs, which is the size, arrangement, and filling of the microstructure air holes in the PCF. Basic guidance principles include index guidance and photonic band gap guidance, while the liquid crystals or fluids infiltration adds tunability to PCFs. Finally, the interferometric, Sagnac-loop, and surface plasmon resonance effects turn the modifications of the fiber or its environment into an optical signal. Based on the comparative study in Section 10 and the difficulties outlined in Section 11, future development of the field can be expected in both novel guidance schemes and integration of known approaches, such as plasmonics, fluids infiltration, and multicore modes engineering.

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