Polarization-maintaining photonic crystal fiber couplers (PM-PCFCs) were fabricated using a CO2 laser irradiation technique. We could control the states of air holes in the tapered region of couplers by adjusting the laser power density in the fusion and the elongation processes. It was demonstrated that the air hole remaining PM-PCFC exhibited polarization-splitting characteristics and that the air hole collapsed PM-PCFC had polarization insensitive coupling characteristics.

Thermally-diffused expanded core (TEC) techniques brought the fibers with the mode fields expanded by thermal diffusion of core dopants. The techniques are effective to the reduction of splice or connection losses between the different kind of fibers, and are applied to the integrations of thin film optical devices in fiber networks, the fabrications of chirped fiber gratings, and so on. In the practical use of TEC techniques, the fibers are heated high temperature of about 1650 because of a short peried of time in processing by microburners. The mode field diameter expansion (MFDE) ratio, which is defined as the ratio of the mode field diameter in the fiber section having the core expanded and that unexpanded, is desired to be more than 2.0 from the viewpoint of loss reduction in industrial uses of the TEC techniques. When the TEC techniques are applied to polarization-maintaining optical fibers (PM fibers), such as PANDA fibers, both core dopants and stress applying part (SAP) dopants diffuse simultaneously. So the MFDE ratio is less than two without mode field deformation in conventional PANDA fibers which are practically used as PM fibers. In this paper a PANDA fiber design suitable for the TEC techniques is newly proposed. The fiber has 1.28 µm cutoff wavelength and the mode field diameter is about 11 µm before core expansion at 1.3µm wavelength.