ABSTRACT
The advent of mature techniques to tailor structures on the micro and nano scales in the late 1980s provided the opportunity to investigate the interaction of light with structured matter. The single material fibers consisted of small diameter rods supported on thin plates in the center of large diameter protective tubes. 2D and 3D photonic crystal structures are artificially generated in periodic dielectric structures in which light behaves the same way as electron waves in natural crystals. Frequency dependent group velocity leads to temporal pulse broadening and is generally termed group velocity dispersion. Nonlinear microstructured optical fibers are fabricated by the stack and draw method, which is very versatile and cost effective and allows easy control over core shape and size as well as the index profile of the cladding region.
