Photonic crystal fibres with large nonlinear coefficients

We investigate the upper limits on the nonlinear coefficients obtainable in various silica-based photonic crystal fibre designs. For a fixed wavelength, the highest nonlinearities are found to occur when a substantial part of the field energy resides in air. The case of a silica strand in air is found to constitute an upper bound on the nonlinear coefficients obtained; however, all the designs investigated allow nonlinear coefficients larger than 50% of this limiting value. On the other hand, the choice of fibre design is found to have a significant influence on the dispersion properties.