Birefringence analysis of multilayer leaky cladding optical fibre

We analyze a multilayer leaky cladding (MLC) fibre using the finite element method and study the effect of the MLC on the bending loss and birefringence of two types of structures: i) a circular-core large-mode area structure and ii) an elliptical-small-core structure. In a large-mode-area structure, we verify that the multi-layer leaky cladding strongly discriminates against higher order modes to achieve single-mode operation, the fibre shows negligible birefringence, and the bending loss of the fibre is low for bending radii larger than 10 cm. In the elliptical-small-core structure we show that the MLC reduces the birefringence of the fibre. This prevents the structure from becoming birefringent in case of any departures from circular geometry. The study should be useful in the designs of MLC fibres for various applications including high-power amplifiers, gain flattening of fibre amplifiers and dispersion compensation.