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

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

doi:10.1038/s41467-021-24409-w

Georg Rademacher, Yoshinari Awaji + Show 11 more

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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.

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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
Space-division multiplexing (SDM)[1] is a promising technology to overcome the capacity limitations of current single-mode fiber (SMF)-based optical communications systems[2] and to satisfy the exponentially increasing capacity demands by transmitting different data streams over spatially diverse transmission paths[3]
While promising transmission demonstrations have been made using a weakly coupled 4-core MCF22,23, it is evident that the highest spatial channel density and the largest number of spatial channels in a standard cladding diameter fiber can be achieved in MMF9 as parallel spatial channels share the cross-section of the fiber-core

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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. 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 multimode 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. Space-division multiplexing (SDM)[1] is a promising technology to overcome the capacity limitations of current single-mode fiber (SMF)-based optical communications systems[2] and to satisfy the exponentially increasing capacity demands by transmitting different data streams over spatially diverse transmission paths[3]. The comb lines were modulated to produce 15 × 382 × 24.5 GBaud dual-polarization

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