Hollow antiresonant fibers with reduced attenuation.

An improved design for hollow antiresonant fibers (HAFs) is presented. It consists of adding extra antiresonant glass elements within the air cladding region of an antiresonant hollow-core fiber. We use numerical simulations to compare fiber structures with and without the additional cladding elements in the near- and mid-IR regimes. We show that realizable fiber structures can provide greatly improved performance in terms of leakage and bending losses compared to previously reported antiresonant fibers. At mid-IR wavelengths, the adoption of this novel fiber design will lead to HAFs with reduced bending losses. In the near-IR, this design could lead to the fabrication of HAFs with very low attenuation.