Large-effective-area ten-core fiber with cladding diameter of about 200 μm

Abstract

A multicore fiber with two-pitch layout is proposed to overcome the trade-off between core number and a cladding diameter of a standard hexagonal layout with a single-core pitch. A fabricated ten-core fiber simultaneously realizes effective area of about 120 μm 2 at 1550 nm, small crosstalk, and cladding diameter of 204 μm. The crosstalk between the center core and outer cores is about 30 dB smaller than that between outer cores. The small crosstalk of the center core would help to keep the transmission quality of the center core at the same level as that of the outer cores.

Multicore fibers for large capacity transmission

“…Coupled MCFs supporting single transverse mode and multi transverse modes have been investigated for high power fiber laser applications [9,10], since they are able to be used as large-mode-area (LMA) fibers, while the coupled MCFs supporting a few supermodes can be used as few-mode fibers (FMFs) for large capacity transmission experiments with mode-division multiplexing (MDM) technique [11][12][13][14]. In terms of core arrangement in uncoupled MCFs, homogeneous MCFs with identical multiple cores [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30] and heterogeneous MCFs with several kinds of different cores [31][32][33][34][35] have been reported. In addition, each core can be designed to support not only single mode but also few modes and multi modes, and they can be called single-mode MCF (SM-MCF), few-mode MCF (FM-MCF) [36][37][38][39][40][41][42], and multimode MCF (MM-MCF) [43], respectively.…”

“…In addition, each core can be designed to support not only single mode but also few modes and multi modes, and they can be called single-mode MCF (SM-MCF), few-mode MCF (FM-MCF) [36][37][38][39][40][41][42], and multimode MCF (MM-MCF) [43], respectively. Table 1 summarizes the recently fabricated uncoupled SM-MCFs [15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30]. In the uncoupled MCFs, high core density as well as low attenuation and large effective area, A eff , are important characteristics for utilizing MCFs as a transmission fiber to improve optical signal to noise ratio (OSNR) and SDM efficiency.…”

“…There is no standard cladding size in MCFs at this moment, however, a small cladding diameter is preferable not only for achieving a high core density but also for maintaining high mechanical reliability for bending. Considering a failure probability, a cladding diameter of MCFs should be smaller than 230 μm to satisfy the limit of failure probability [24]. The number of cores able to be multiplexed in a fiber is determined by the core-to-core distance with a fixed outer cladding diameter.…”

Interleaved Core Assignment for Bidirectional Transmission in Multi-Core Fibers

“…The main issue with the HCPS is that the center core experiences excessive crosstalk compared to the outer cores 7 . Other structures have been proposed to eliminate this issue, including two-pitch structure (TPS) 8 and onering structure (ORS) 9 , as shown in Fig For homogeneous MCFs with a small bending radius, the mean crosstalk between two adjacent cores can be analytically expressed as 10…”

Multi-Element Fibre for Space-Division Multiplexed Transmission

“…Free-space optics MUX/DEMUX devices are more effective; however, they require accurate alignment, leaving questions as to their practicality for deployment in real systems. Also, the cladding diameter in MCFs is restricted to about 225μm in order to maintain the same mechanical reliability level as SMF [7]. This criterion, along with the minimum pitch required for low crosstalk, restricts the effective area of cores (A eff ) and maximum number of cores that can be accommodated in an MCF design.…”