Theoretical investigation on guiding IR light in hollow-core metallic fiber with corrugated inner surface

Hollow metallic fibers (HMFs) are in general lossy primarily owing to the fact that the guided transverse-magnetic (TM) light sustains a relatively high propagation loss. In this paper, we propose a type of practical hollow-core metallic fiber (HMF) with longitudinally corrugated inner surface for transmitting infrared (IR) light. Simulation results show that the loss of the fundamental TM mode can be easily reduced by 50~100 times compared to a HMF without surface corrugation. In contrast to the traditional HMF with a dielectric coating, it is shown that the loss of the fundamental TM mode in the proposed HMF is relatively insensitive to the corrugation layer thickness or equivalently the operating frequency.