Ring-core photonic crystal fiber for propagation of OAM modes.

We propose and fabricate a novel ring-core photonic crystal fiber made of a circular ring core surrounded by a cladding constituted of air holes organized in a first circular ring surrounded by hexagonal ones. The fiber efficiently supports four different groups of orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes. The effective indices of spin-orbit aligned and spin-orbit anti-aligned modes in the same OAM modes group are separated by at least 2.13×10-3 at 1550 nm. The realized fiber is expected to be a good platform for applications involving OAM modes.