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: Mode volume

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