Incorporating conductive materials into a photonic crystal fiber: toward optoelectronic applications.

We report a method to selectively fill arbitrary air holes of microstructured photonic crystal fibers with conductive materials through microsphere-assisted fabrication. A photonic crystal fiber with three of its air holes filled with gallium is fabricated and optically characterized. Further it is shown that nanomaterials such as carbon nanotube can be attached to the tip of the conductive channel through additional optical soldering post-processing.