RESUMEN
We report the characterization of a birefringent all-solid hybrid microstructured fiber, in which the core-modes are guided by both the photonic bandgap (PBG) effect and total internal reflection (TIR). Due to the twofold symmetry, modal birefringence of 1.5 x 10(-4) and group birefringence of 2.1 x 10(-4) were measured at 1.31 microm, which is in the middle of the second bandgap. The band structure was calculated to be different from conventional 2-D PBG fibers due to the 1-D arrangement of high-index regions. The bend loss has a strong directional dependence due to the coexistence of the two guiding mechanisms. The fiber has two important properties pertinent to PBG fibers; spectral filtering, and chromatic dispersion specific to PBG fibers. The number of high-index regions, which trap pump power (by index guiding) when the fiber is used in cladding-pumped fiber lasers, is greatly reduced so that this fiber should enable efficient cladding pumping. This structure is suitable for linearly-polarized, cladding-pumped fiber lasers utilizing the properties of PBG fibers.