The paper presents the properties of a strain sensor, which was made using the micro hole collapse method and operates in the configuration of a Mach-Zehnder modal interferometer with a PM-1550-01 polarization maintaining photonic crystal fibre. The sensor’s transfer curve was determined analytically. Its strain sensitivity, determined from measurements, decreases slightly with increasing wavelength and is in a range from −2.01 to −2.23 pm/µε in the wavelength range 1520–1580 nm. Based on the Fourier analysis of the wavelength spectrum of the constructed sensor, the difference of the group refractive indices of the core and the cladding of the photonic crystal fibre was determined, which are in a range from 7.45·10−3 to 1.01·10−2. The temperature sensitivity of the sensor, determined on the basis of measurements performed in a range from 23 to 60◦C, is positive and equals 5.9 pm/K.

In this paper, triangular lattice index-guiding photonic crystal fibres (PCFs) are synthesized to compensate the chromatic dispersion of a single mode fibre (SMF-28) for an 80 km optical link operating at 1.55 μm, by using a directed tabu search algorithm. Hole-to-hole distance, circular air-hole diameter, solid-core diameter, ring number and PCF length parameters are optimized for this purpose. Three synthesized PCFs with different physical parameters are compared in terms of their objective functions values, residual dispersions, compensation ratios and confinement losses.

In this work studies on propagation properties of a microstructured polymer optical fibre infiltrated with a nematic liquid crystal are presented. Specifically, the influence of an infiltration method on the LC molecular alignment inside fibre air-channels and, thus, on light guidance is discussed. Switching between propagation mechanisms, namely the transition from modified total internal reflection (mTIR) to the photonic bandgap effect obtained by varying external temperature is also demonstrated.