Peta-bit-per-second optical communications system using a standard cladding diameter 15-mode fiber

Georg Rademacher; Benjamin J Puttnam; Ruben S Luís; Tobias A Eriksson; Nicolas K Fontaine; Mikael Mazur; Haoshuo Chen; Roland Ryf; David T Neilson; Pierre Sillard; Frank Achten; Yoshinari Awaji; Hideaki Furukawa

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-24409-w

Peta-bit-per-second optical communications system using a standard cladding diameter 15-mode fiber

Nat Commun. 2021 Jul 9;12(1):4238. doi: 10.1038/s41467-021-24409-w.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Photonic Network Laboratory, Photonic ICT Research Center, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Koganei, Tokyo, Japan. georg.rademacher@nict.go.jp.
² Photonic Network Laboratory, Photonic ICT Research Center, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, Koganei, Tokyo, Japan.
³ Infinera, Stockholm, Sweden.
⁴ Nokia Bell Labs, New Providence, NJ, USA.
⁵ Prysmian Group, Billy Berclau, Haisnes Cedex, France.
⁶ Prysmian Group, Eindhoven, CA, The Netherlands.

Abstract

Data rates in optical fiber networks have increased exponentially over the past decades and core-networks are expected to operate in the peta-bit-per-second regime by 2030. As current single-mode fiber-based transmission systems are reaching their capacity limits, space-division multiplexing has been investigated as a means to increase the per-fiber capacity. Of all space-division multiplexing fibers proposed to date, multi-mode fibers have the highest spatial channel density, as signals traveling in orthogonal fiber modes share the same fiber-core. By combining a high mode-count multi-mode fiber with wideband wavelength-division multiplexing, we report a peta-bit-per-second class transmission demonstration in multi-mode fibers. This was enabled by combining three key technologies: a wideband optical comb-based transmitter to generate highly spectral efficient 64-quadrature-amplitude modulated signals between 1528 nm and 1610 nm wavelength, a broadband mode-multiplexer, based on multi-plane light conversion, and a 15-mode multi-mode fiber with optimized transmission characteristics for wideband operation.