Effect of external stress on propagation properties of hexagonal and octagonal PCF

External stress and design parameters of photonic crystal fiber (PCF) play significant role in controlling the propagation properties during drawing process. In this paper, we have analyzed and simulated the effect of external stress and design parameters on PCF's propagation properties for two kinds of air-hole arrangement using finite element method. The effective indices for both arrangements are observed in FEMLAB environment by varying the number of air hole rings and then birefringence, effective area and polarization mode dispersion (PMD) are calculated. It is found that under same values of external stress and various design parameter, the effect on effective area, birefringence and PMD is higher in hexagonal air-hole arranged PCF than octagonal.