Guifang Li's OFC Group's work on few-mode fiber amplifier is featured in Laser Focus World magazine
The intensity profile of pump and signal modes are shown for a few-moded fiber amplifier (left), along with their normalized intensity profiles as viewed along the x-axis (right).
From
Laser Focus World:
To increase the transmission capacity of a single optical fiber, an alternative to dense wavelength-division multiplexing (DWDM) called spatial-division multiplexing (SDM) has been proposed using either
multicore optical fibers or few-mode fibers (FMFs).
The FMFs are a type of fiber with a core area large enough to transmit parallel data streams in a few independent spatial modes. Ideally, the capacity of an FMF is proportional to the number of modes. However, to extend transmission distance, few-mode fiber amplifiers are required that—unlike those used in
free-space optical communication and high-power laser applications—have controllable mode-dependent gain to ensure all SDM channels are optimized.
Now, researchers at CREOL—The College of Optics & Photonics at the University of Central Florida (Orlando, FL)—and NEC Laboratories America (Princeton, NJ) have developed a method for controlling modal gain in a few-mode erbium-doped fiber amplifier (FM-EDFA) to expand the viability of mode-division-multiplexed optical communications networks.
more...
Posted Monday, May 07, 2012
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