Ge-doped air-core ring fiber supporting >400 radially fundamental OAM modes across O, E, S, C, L bands

A pivotal issue of the conventional optical fiber communications networks is to meet the explosively increasing requirement in data traffic. In order to meet this ever-increasing demand, there have been a lot of research and industrial development efforts to utilize the photon in various dimensions such as wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), space division multiplexing (SDM), mode division multiplexing (MDM) and so on. Fueled by emerging bandwidth-hungry applications, orbital angular momentum (OAM) modes and their multiplexing have recently gained much attention due to its special doughnut-shaped intensity distribution, as well as its unique helical phase wavefront with the theoretically infinite topological value. The OAM modes with different topological charge values are orthogonal to each other, which has provided a new degree of freedom in MDM. In this paper, we propose and design a Ge-doped air-core ring fiber, which can support numerous OAM modes. By varying the mole fraction of GeO2 and adjusting the structure parameter, including the air-core radius and the GeO2-doped ring width, we study the influence of the different fiber parameters on the total supported OAM mode number. The hollow silica fiber with a 50-μm air core and a 1.5-μm thickness of Gedoped ring is designed in simulation to support fiber eigenmodes up to HE112,1 and EH107,1. This provides 436 OAM modes at 1550 nm while maintaining radially single mode condition. Moreover, it can support more than 400 OAM modes from 1260 nm to 1625 nm, covering O, E, S, C, and L bands.