Optical communications technology has made enormous and steady progress for several decades, providing the key resource in our increasingly information-driven society and economy. Much of this progress has been in finding innovative ways to increase the data carrying capacity of a single optical fibre. In this search, researchers have explored (and close to maximally exploited) every available degree of freedom, and even commercial systems now utilize multiplexing in time, wavelength, polarization, and phase to speed more information through the fibre infrastructure. Conspicuously, one potentially enormous source of improvement has however been left untapped in these systems: fibres can easily support hundreds of spatial modes, but today's commercial systems (single-mode or multi-mode) make no attempt to use these as parallel channels for independent signals.

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Lightwave communications is a necessity for the information age. Optical links provide enormous bandwidth, and the optical fiber is the only medium that can meet the modern society's needs for transporting massive amounts of data over long distances. Applications range from global highcapacity networks, which constitute the backbone of the internet, to the massively parallel interconnects that provide data connectivity inside datacenters and supercomputers. Optical communications is a diverse and rapidly changing field, where experts in photonics, communications, electronics, and signal processing work side by side to meet the ever-increasing demands for higher capacity, lower cost, and lower energy consumption, while adapting the system design to novel services and technologies. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of this rich research field, Journal of Optics has invited 16 researchers, each a world-leading expert in their respective subfields, to contribute a section to this invited review article, summarizing their views on state-of-the-art and future developments in optical communications.

Optical fiber tapers with a waist size larger than 1microm are commonplace in telecommunications and sensor applications. However the fabrication of low-loss optical fiber tapers with subwavelength diameters was previously thought to be impractical due to difficulties associated with control of the surface roughness and diameter uniformity. In this paper we show that very-long ultra-low-loss tapers can in fact be produced using a conventional fiber taper rig incorporating a simple burner configuration. For single-mode operation, the optical losses we achieve at 1.55microm are one order of magnitude lower than losses previously reported in the literature for tapers of a similar size. SEM images confirm excellent taper uniformity. We believe that these low-loss structures should pave the way to a whole range of fiber nanodevices.

We report on the fabrication of what we believe is the first example of a two-dimensional (2D) nonlinear photonic crystal [Berger, Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 4136 (1998)], where the refractive index is constant but where the 2nd order nonlinear susceptibility is spatially periodic. Such crystals allow for efficient quasi-phase-matched 2nd harmonic generation using multiple reciprocal lattice vectors. External 2nd harmonic conversion efficiencies >60% were measured with picosecond pulses. The fabrication technique is extremely versatile and should allow for the fabrication of a broad range of 2D crystals including quasicrystals.