Design of PANDA ring-core fiber with 10 polarization-maintaining modes

• DOI: 10.1364/prj.5.000001
• Publication Date: 2016-12-08T18:51:22Z
• Authors: Haozhe Yan; Shangyuan Li; Zhengyang Xie; Xiaoping Zheng; Hanyi Zhang; Bingkun Zhou
• Keywords: 0103 physical sciences; 01 natural sciences

We present a polarization-maintaining PANDA ring-core fiber (PM-PRCF) characterized by the combination of a ring-core structure with two stress-applying rods. This special fiber design separates the adjacent modes and avoids the cutoff of the higher-order modes, which is a common problem in elliptical core polarization-maintaining few-mode fibers. Using a high-contrast index ring and stress-induced birefringence, the PM-PRCF features support for 10 vector modes, with effective refractive index separations from their adjacent modes >10−4. Broadband performance is investigated subsequently over a wide wavelength range from 1500 to 1630 nm. The proposed fiber is targeted at applications in space-division multiplexing while eliminating the complex multiple-input multiple-output signal processing.