A six-strut suspended core fiber for cylindrical vector mode generation and propagation.

We report fabrication and simulation of an F2 glass six-strut suspended core fiber (SCF) with small effective core diameter of 2.5 μm for cylindrical vector (CV) modes generation and propagation. Simulation results show that the fiber has a large effective refractive index difference in the order of 10-10 between the first higher-order CV modes, including TE, HEeven and odd and TM modes. TE and TM were experimentally generated and were evaluated as having high purity of 82 percent and 85 percent, respectively. The results demonstrate that the SCF is a competitive waveguide candidate for selectable CV mode generation and propagation.