Modern society has become increasingly reliant on the critical infrastructure of optical fiber for delivering information and power at a scale never seen before. This has triggered the famous copper-to-silica transition that occurred some 40 years ago. Whether this tendency will continue and initiate another silica-to-air transition are still an open question. However, by virtue of the rapid advances of MOF,it has been widely accepted that in a lot of applications artificial photonic cladding structures of regularly/irregularly arranged microscopic hollow channels can deliver orders of magnitude improvement over the prior art of purified bulk glass materials.

The first wave of MOF research climax occurred with the advent of Endless Single-Mode and Photonic Band-Gap guiding properties. It quickly led to many celebrated applications in the fields of Nonlinear Optics and Laser Optics, such as supercontinuum generation from unamplified laser pulses, ultra-large mode area fiber for laser power scaling, high-efficiency gas-Raman cells, and so on.

The currently-undergoing second round of MOF innovations originate from the identification and exploitation of another kind of light guidance called Anti-Resonant Reflecting (or Leakage Suppression). Over the course of a few years, the ratio of minimum loss between silica glass fiber and hollow-core anti-resonant fiber has fallen to less than 2 (by more than 3 orders of magnitude). Our group had made both experimental and theoretical contributions in this process, and will continuously focus on the exploration of novel MOF applications in long-haul transmission, e.g. Optical Communications, Quantum Optics, and Distributed Sensing.

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现代社会的正常运行无时无刻离不开一张巨大的光纤网络为人们提供的巨大的信息和能量传输能力。为了让传输变得更加高效，四十年前人类已经经历了一次“玻璃代铜”的巨大转变。未来是否还会有一次“空气代玻璃”的转变，我们无法得知。但是，30年来微结构光纤领域取得的巨大研究进展已经明确的指出，以一定规则排列的玻璃孔洞充当包层“材料”可以给光纤带来传统方法无法企及的性能优势。

微结构光纤研究的第一波高潮发端于“无截止单模”和“光子禁带导光”效应的发现。这些新奇的效应在传统全内反射光纤中无法获得，它们被迅速转化为非线性光学和激光光学中的各种应用。比较著名的有，超连续光纤激光、光子晶体光纤棒、光纤Raman气体室、等。

当前正在蓬勃涌现的第二波微结构光纤研究高潮起源于对另一种光纤导光能力（“反谐振反射”效应）的确认和开发利用。在不到十年的时间里，“反谐振”空芯光纤的最低损耗降到了与石英光纤最低损耗相差不足2倍的水平。我们组积极参与了这一波研究，在实验和理论两方面都做出了一定贡献。我们组发明的“连体管”式结构和南安普顿大学光电中心制作的“嵌套管”式结构是低损耗反谐振空芯光纤最成功的两款结构。

未来，我们组的研究重心将更多放在对长距离微结构光纤的应用探索上。我们希望看到微结构光纤的导光机制可以在光通信、量子光学、分布式传感等领域带来新奇的效应。