Abstract

Recently optical amplification technologies for mode-division multiplexing (MDM) transmission systems and networks have attracted great interest. In this article, we first propose a compact structure of few-mode Erbium-doped fiber amplifier (FM-EDFA) for weakly-coupled MDM amplification, which is characterized by weakly-coupled few-mode Erbium-doped fiber (EDF), cascaded mode-selective couplers (MSCs) for spatial mode control of pump lights, and few-mode wavelength multiplexer (FM-WMUX) for pump/signal coupling. Compared to previous studies, the proposed FM-EDFA has a similar structure with commercial single-mode EDFA (SM-EDFA) and can support weakly-coupled MDM transmission without inducing large modal crosstalk. Then related components are designed and fabricated for a 2-mode proposed FM-EDFA. The mode-field mismatching between transmission FMF and EDF under central alignment is investigated by simulation. Thanks to the effective suppression of modal crosstalk for the optical components, the transmission FMF, the EDF and their coupling, we experimentally demonstrate the first weakly-coupled MDM-WDM amplification and transmission over 15-km 2-mode FMF with 10-Gb/s optical on-off keying (OOK) modulation and direct detection. The proposed FM-EDFA can be extended to MDM transmission systems and networks supporting more modes.

Wavelength-interleaved MDM-WDM transmission over weakly-coupled FMF

Yu Tian, Juhao Li, Zhongying Wu, Yuanxiang Chen, Paikun Zhu, Ruizhi Tang, Qi Mo, Yongqi He, and Zhangyuan Chen
Opt. Express 25(14) 16603-16617 (2017)

Long-haul intermodal-MIMO-free MDM transmission based on a weakly coupled multiple-ring-core few-mode fiber

Mingqing Zuo, Dawei Ge, JiaXin Liu, Yuyang Gao, Lei Shen, Xiaobo Lan, Zhangyuan Chen, Yongqi He, and Juhao Li
Opt. Express 30(4) 5868-5878 (2022)

Weakly-coupled 4-mode step-index FMF and demonstration of IM/DD MDM transmission

Tao Hu, Juhao Li, Dawei Ge, Zhongying Wu, Yu Tian, Lei Shen, Yaping Liu, Su Chen, Zhengbin Li, Yongqi He, and Zhangyuan Chen
Opt. Express 26(7) 8356-8363 (2018)

High-gain integrated in-line few-mode amplifier enabling 3840-km long-haul transmission

Tao Xu, Tianyu Gao, Yanze Wang, Wenhao Li, Wei Li, Cheng Du, Zhiqun Yang, Yaping Liu, and Lin Zhang
Photon. Res. 10(12) 2794-2801 (2022)

Demonstration of all-optical MDM/WDM switching for short-reach networks

Zhongying Wu, Juhao Li, Dawei Ge, Fang Ren, Paikun Zhu, Qi Mo, Zhengbin Li, Zhangyuan Chen, and Yongqi He
Opt. Express 24(19) 21609-21618 (2016)