Crystal Fibre A/S, Denmark (CF)

Crystal Fibre (CF) designs, manufactures and markets photonic crystal fibres (PCFs), also known as micro-structured or holey fibres. The company launched its first product in the summer of 2000 and has since then expanded its product range considerably. CF is today the largest commercial suppliers of photonic crystal fibres and offer a diversity of specialty fibres within non-linear fibres, double cladding laser fibre, large mode area fibres as well as high NA and UV optimized fibres.

The company was established late 1999 on the basis of know-how and patent applications held by a number of research scientists at COM at the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) and is wholly owned by NKT Holding A/S (www.nkt.dk).

Today CF runs a complete fibre fabrication facility in the north of Copenhagen, Denmark, enabling the company to handle all development, fabrication and characterization in-house. Crystal Fibre currently employs 21 people of which ¾ are engineers most of which hold PhD degrees. In addition, the company runs several industrial PhD projects.

Crystal Fibre is the worlds leading manufacturer of dispersion engineered nonlinear fibres, and has several nonlinear "firsts":

• First nonlinear PCF with zero dispersion at 1550 nm (also the winner of The Photonics Circle of Excellence Award in 2002)
• First nonlinear single-mode fibre with zero-dispersion at 800 nm
• First nonlinear single-mode polarization-maintaining fibre with zero-dispersion at 800 nm
• First nonlinear single-mode PCF with zero-dispersion at 1060 nm
• First nonlinear 1550 nm zero dispersion-slope fibre

In addition, the company has a large experience in supercontinuum generation with pumping at the major laser wavelengths (800, 1064, 1550 nm), and has developed several fibres dedicated to supercontinuum generation.

The project is important for Crystal Fibre as developing fibres for supercontinuum generation is a vastly complex task, which needs testing in actual supercontinuum generation setups and application feedback from end-users. Such setups require specialized knowledge and resources that Crystal Fibre does not have in-house and collaboration with external experts on supercontinuum generation and its applications (in this case OCT) are therefore vital for the further development of supercontinuum optimized fibres.

Crystal Fibre is a strong partner in the consortium and the expertise of the company will be vital for the success of the project as the dispersion-engineered fibres will be a key component in the broad band sources pursued where standard off-the-shelves fibres cannot deliver the required performance.