Reaching the pinnacle of high-capacity optical transmission using a standard cladding diameter coupled-core multi-core fiber
Menno van den Hout, Ruben S. Lúıs, Benjamin J. Puttnam, Giammarco Di Sciullo, Tetsuya Hayashi, Ayumi Inoue, Takuji Nagashima, Simon Gross, Andrew Ross‐Adams, Michael J. Withford, Lauren Dallachiesa, Nicolas K. Fontaine, Roland Ryf, Mikael Mazur, Haoshuo Chen, Jun Sakaguchi, Cristian Antonelli, Chigo Okonkwo, Hideaki Furukawa, Georg Rademacher
Abstract
Data rates in optical networks have grown exponentially in recent decades and are expected to grow beyond the fundamental limits of current standard single-mode fiber networks. As such, novel transmission technologies are required to sustain this growth, and space-division multiplexing provides the most promising candidate to scale the capacity of optical networks in a way that is also cost-effective. For fiber fabrication and deployment, it is highly beneficial to use fibers with a standard cladding diameter. Here we demonstrate petabit-per-second-class data transmission using a space-division multiplexing fiber that approaches the limits of spatial multiplexing whilst minimizing the required signal processing complexity. This is done by designing and fabricating a low-loss 19-core multi-core fiber with randomly-coupled cores, a standard cladding diameter, and supporting a wideband wavelength-division multiplexed signal. The resulting data rate of 1.7 petabit/s is the highest reported amongst standard cladding diameter multi-core fibers and is approximately more than an order of magnitude higher than is supported by currently deployed single-mode fibers, paving the way for next-generation ultra-fast optical transmission networks.