Resonant bend loss in leakage channel fibers

Leakage channel fibers, designed to suppress higher-order modes, demonstrate resonant power loss at certain critical radii of curvature. Outside the resonance, the power recovers to the levels offset by the usual mechanism of bend-induced loss. Using C2 imaging, we experimentally characterize this anomaly and identify the corresponding physical mechanism as the radiative decay of the fundamental mode mediated by the resonant coupling to a cladding mode.