Cladding Pumped Multi-Core Fiber Amplifiers for Space Division Multiplexing

We review the challenges of cladding pumped multi-core optical fiber amplifiers for application to space division multiplexing (SDM). Through numerical simulations, we investigate two fiber designs: the first one with a uniform cladding and the second one with an annular cladding to guide the pump. We compare the multi-core amplifier gain, noise figure and pumping efficiency in a WDM scenario. We present the fabricated fibers and summarize experimentally measured performance that shows gain>20 dB and NF<6 dB over the whole C-band. Finally, we examine scalability of the annular cladding design.

[1]  Partha P. Mitra,et al.  Nonlinear limits to the information capacity of optical fibre communications , 2000, Nature.

[2]  Sophie LaRochelle,et al.  Demonstration of Cladding-Pumped Six-Core Erbium-Doped Fiber Amplifier , 2016, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[3]  S. LaRochelle,et al.  Integrated cladding-pumped multicore few-mode erbium-doped fibre amplifier for space-division-multiplexed communications , 2016 .

[4]  S. LaRochelle,et al.  Annular cladding erbium-doped multi-core fiber for SDM amplification , 2015, 2015 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO).

[5]  Sang Joon Kim,et al.  A Mathematical Theory of Communication , 2006 .

[6]  John Lehrer Zyskind.  Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers , 1992, Other Conferences.

[7]  F. Poletti,et al.  Cladding pumped few-mode EDFA for mode division multiplexed transmission. , 2014, Optics express.

[8]  Sophie LaRochelle,et al.  Characterization of annular cladding erbium-doped 6-core fiber amplifier , 2016, 2016 Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC).

[9]  Lionel Provost,et al.  Few-mode fiber for uncoupled mode-division multiplexing transmissions , 2011, 2011 37th European Conference and Exhibition on Optical Communication.

[10]  E. Desurvire.  Erbium-doped fiber amplifiers , 1994 .

[11]  Toshio Morioka,et al.  32-core erbium/ytterbium-doped multicore fiber amplifier for next generation space-division multiplexed transmission system , 2017 .

[12]  T. Hayashi,et al.  Design and fabrication of ultra-low crosstalk and low-loss multi-core fiber. , 2011, Optics express.

[13]  Takenaga Katsuhiro,et al.  A large effective area multi-core fiber , 2011 .

[14]  Eric M. Monberg,et al.  Multicore Erbium Doped Fiber Amplifiers for Space Division Multiplexing Systems , 2014, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[15]  Peter M. Krummrich.  Efficient optical amplification for spatial division multiplexing , 2011, OPTO.

[16]  B Zhu,et al.  Amplification and noise properties of an erbium-doped multicore fiber amplifier. , 2011, Optics express.

[17]  S. LaRochelle,et al.  Cladding Pumped EDFAs with Annular Erbium Doping , 2018, 2018 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO).

[18]  Osamu Shimakawa,et al.  Design and fabrication of ultra-low crosstalk and low-loss multi-core fiber: erratum. , 2011, Optics express.

[19]  L. Nelson,et al.  Space-division multiplexing in optical fibres , 2013, Nature Photonics.

[20]  D. J. Richardson,et al.  1-Pb/s (32 SDM/46 WDM/768 Gb/s) C-band dense SDM transmission over 205.6-km of single-mode heterogeneous multi-core fiber using 96-Gbaud PDM-16QAM channels , 2017, 2017 Optical Fiber Communications Conference and Exhibition (OFC).

[21]  P. Winzer,et al.  Capacity Limits of Optical Fiber Networks , 2010, Journal of Lightwave Technology.

[22]  Toshio Morioka,et al.  12-core × 3-mode dense space division multiplexed transmission over 40 km employing multi-carrier signals with parallel MIMO equalization , 2014, OFC 2014.

[23]  M. Nakazawa,et al.  10.16-Peta-B/s Dense SDM/WDM Transmission Over 6-Mode 19-Core Fiber Across the C+L Band , 2018, Journal of Lightwave Technology.