Low-Loss Anti-Resonant Hollow-Core Sulfide Glass Fibers

Anti-resonant hollow-core fibers (AR-HCFs) based on infrared soft glasses are promising propagation media for high-power infrared laser delivery. However, it remains technically challenging to fabricate the expected soft-glass AR-HCFs precisely because of the complex fabrication processes. This requires a comprehensive understanding of the geometrical evolution during fiber drawing, rather than relying on trial and error. To this end, the Jasion drawing model based on fluid dynamics was extended to explore the drawing dynamics for the fabrication of soft-glass AR-HCFs. Here we demonstrated how this model provides process optimization strategies and predictions of the required parameters through virtual drawing. A series of sulfide AR-HCFs with losses comparable to or lower than those achievable in solid-core sulfide fibers around wavelengths of 2, 4.79, and 7.4 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu$</tex-math></inline-formula>m, were successfully fabricated. These results hold promise for advancing the fabrication of ultralow-loss soft-glass AR-HCFs.