Design and analysis of low-loss and low-dispersion hybrid cladding tube antiresonant fiber for the THz regime

This article aims to highlight the development of a novel antiresonant fiber with a hollow core and four elliptical and circular cladding tubes for terahertz communication applications. The fiber substrate material is Zeonex, and its performance is analyzed using COMSOL Multiphysics software with an operating frequency of 0.5 \(-\) $-$ 2.8 THz. Based on the variation of cladding tube dimensions, the fiber performance is analyzed with distinct tube thicknesses (t) of 0.08, 0.10, and 0.12 mm. This fiber model has been revealed low confinement loss (CL) of 1.02 \(\times 10^{-6}\) $\times {10}^{-6}$ \(dBcm^{-1}\) $dBc{m}^{-1}$ at a tube thickness of 0.10 mm, negligible effective material loss (EML) of 6.36 \(\times 10^{-6}\) $\times {10}^{-6}$ \(dBcm^{-1}\) $dBc{m}^{-1}$ , propagation loss of 9.50 \(\times 10^{-6}\) $\times {10}^{-6}$ \(dBcm^{-1}\) $dBc{m}^{-1}$ and a broad low-loss transmission bandwidth of 0.9 THz. Additionally, it exhibits a near-flat zero dispersion bandwidth of 1.3 THz, a maximum power fraction of 99.9 \(\%\) $\%$ , and a higher order mode extinction ratio (HOMER) of 220. Analysis was also made of confinement loss for the proposed fiber’s higher-order modes (HOMs).