Several papers on metamaterial-cladding hollow core fibers have come out just in the past couple of weeks. We had our very own Optics Express paper presenting an analytic model for calculating the dispersions (including losses) of large-area hollow core fibers with complex claddings, for an example metamaterial cladding (formed by sub-wavelength metal wires) at 3μm and 10.6μm. This work continues our previous work on such structures, and can be applied to a large variety of geometries.This opens up many new design opportunities, and a simple method for performing otherwise very intensive calculations.

M. Zeisberger, A. Tuniz and M. A. Schmidt, “Analytic model for the complex effective index dispersion of metamaterial-cladding large-area hollow core fibers”, Optics Express 24, 20515-20528 (2016).

At the same time, the metamaterial fibers group in Sydney have shown two back-to back publications showing the theory and experiment of a single-mode, single-polarization hollow-core THz fiber with a metamaterial cladding, consisting of subwavelength-diameter metal wires embedded in a dielectric host, a promising platform for compact and low-loss terahertz waveguides.

Great to see this progress in the field!