Supermodes for optical transmission

Abstract

In this paper, the concept of supermode is introduced for long-distance optical transmission systems. The supermodes exploit coupling between the cores of a multi-core fiber, in which the core-to-core distance is much shorter than that in conventional multi-core fiber. The use of supermodes leads to a larger mode effective area and higher mode density than the conventional multi-core fiber. Through simulations, we show that the proposed coupled multi-core fiber allows lower modal dependent loss, mode coupling and differential modal group delay than few-mode fibers. These properties suggest that the coupled multi-core fiber could be a good candidate for both spatial division multiplexing and single-mode operation.

Supersymmetric Transformations in Optical Fibers

“…4(c)] that are difficult to obtain with classical step-index or gradual-index profiles [61][62][63][64][65][66]. The concept of photonic lantern was originally conceived in the field of astrophotonics to couple the light between a multimode single-core fiber and individual single-mode single-core fibers [61].…”

“…The concept of photonic lantern was originally conceived in the field of astrophotonics to couple the light between a multimode single-core fiber and individual single-mode single-core fibers [61]. In recent years, this device has been extensively developed to inject (extract) light to (from) optical fibers in space-division multiplexing transmissions (i.e., multiplexing techniques that establish multiple spatially distinguishable data paths using multimode singlecore fibers [62][63][64][65][66] and MCFs [67]), as well as for other applications [68]. The photonic lanterns considered in these previous works (based on classical step-index and gradualindex profiles) support homogeneous supermodes, i.e., supermodes generated from the linear combination of degenerate LP modes with the same azimuthal and radial order.…”

“…The photonic lanterns considered in these previous works (based on classical step-index and gradualindex profiles) support homogeneous supermodes, i.e., supermodes generated from the linear combination of degenerate LP modes with the same azimuthal and radial order. Typically, these supermodes are constructed through the linear combination of the LP 01 mode of different cores in a MCF, which requires a high number of cores to obtain supermodes with large effective area [64]. Interestingly, the supermodes are of special interest to increase the tolerance of the signal-to-noise ratio to the fiber Kerr nonlinearities in space-division multiplexing systems.…”

Multicore fibers for large capacity transmission

“…On the other hand, in the coupled MCFs, several cores are placed to strongly and/or weakly couple between each other. 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.…”

Space-division multiplexed transmission over few-mode- and coupled-core fiber based on coherent MIMO digital signal processing

“…18, light launched into a core is almost equally distributed among the cores after 60 km fiber. For such a strong crosstalk, the modes of the individual cores can no longer be considered as individual waveguides, and the mode of the structure as a whole, the "supermodes" 20,38 have to be considered. A fiber cross-section of the 3-core CCF is shown in Fig.…”