A kind of single trench 19-core single-mode heterogeneous fiber with low crosstalk and anti-bending performance

Abstract

The rapid growth of the demand for optical communication capacity promotes optical fiber communication technology. As a method to break through the capacity limitation of conventional single-mode fiber, multi-core fiber based on space division multiplexing technology has attracted extensive attention. In order to respond to the capacity of traditional single-mode fiber positively, we design a scheme of single-mode multi-core fiber combining the arrangement of heterogeneous fiber cores with secondary structure of low refractive index trench. The scheme consists of nineteen fiber cores arranged in a hexagonal closed-packed structure. Heterogeneous trench-assisted multi-core fiber (Hetero-TA-MCF) has low inter-core crosstalk and excellent anti-bending performance. Compared with conventional single-mode fiber, the Hetero-TA-MCF has the large transmission capacity and average effective area of each core of about 80 μm<sup>2</sup>. The transmission capacity of 19 cores is equivalent to the sum of the transmission capacities of 19 single-core single-mode fibers. We use COMSOL Multiphysics to simulate the fiber structure, finding the parameters that affect the properties of the fiber, selecting parameters and structures for optimal performance. Then we calculate the transmission characteristics by the finite element method,and the results of substantive simulating compute are as follows. The Hetero-TA-MCF achieves a low inter-core crosstalk (XT) of about –39 dB/100 km so that each core can be transmitted as a separate channe. It meets the standard of multi-core fiber long distance transmission. The XT of the heterogeneous 19-core single-mode fiber is suitable for multi-core fiber long distance transmission standards. The bending loss of the outermost fiber core is –7.7×10<sup>–5</sup> dB/m when the bending radius is 10 cm, which reflects the low loss characteristics of the structure. The nonlinear coefficients of three kinds of core are 1.28 W<sup>–1</sup>·km<sup>–1</sup>, 1.31 W<sup>–1</sup>·km<sup>–1</sup>, and 1.30 W<sup>–1</sup>·km<sup>–1</sup> respectively, reducing the nonlinear effect of optical fiber effectively; the dispersions of three kinds of cores are less than 24 ps/(nm·km). In addition, the steady single-mode transmission is achieved in <i>C</i>+<i>L</i> band. Compared with traditional single-mode fiber and single-trench homogeneous fiber, the proposed fiber in this work has low crosstalk, good bending resistance and large mode field area, which is suitable for long distance and large capacity transmission in space division multiplexing system.