Weakly-Coupled MDM-WDM Amplification and Transmission Based on Compact FM-EDFA

Recently optical amplification technologies for mode-division multiplexing (MDM) transmission systems and networks have attracted great interest. In this article, we first propose a compact structure of few-mode Erbium-doped fiber amplifier (FM-EDFA) for weakly-coupled MDM amplification, which is ch...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of lightwave technology Vol. 38; no. 18; pp. 5163 - 5169
Main Authors Zhu, Jinglong, Yang, Yu, Zhang, Zhenzhen, Ge, Dawei, Li, Xiaoying, Chen, Zhangyuan, He, Yongqi, Li, Juhao
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York IEEE 15.09.2020
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subjects
Amplification
Coupled modes
Coupling
Couplings
Crosstalk
Doped fibers
Erbium
Erbium-doped fiber amplifier
few-mode fibers
Frequency modulation
mode division multiplexing
Multiplexers
On-Off Keying
Optical components
Optical fiber amplifiers
Optical fiber couplers
Optical fiber networks
Wavelength division multiplexing
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Summary:Recently optical amplification technologies for mode-division multiplexing (MDM) transmission systems and networks have attracted great interest. In this article, we first propose a compact structure of few-mode Erbium-doped fiber amplifier (FM-EDFA) for weakly-coupled MDM amplification, which is characterized by weakly-coupled few-mode Erbium-doped fiber (EDF), cascaded mode-selective couplers (MSCs) for spatial mode control of pump lights, and few-mode wavelength multiplexer (FM-WMUX) for pump/signal coupling. Compared to previous studies, the proposed FM-EDFA has a similar structure with commercial single-mode EDFA (SM-EDFA) and can support weakly-coupled MDM transmission without inducing large modal crosstalk. Then related components are designed and fabricated for a 2-mode proposed FM-EDFA. The mode-field mismatching between transmission FMF and EDF under central alignment is investigated by simulation. Thanks to the effective suppression of modal crosstalk for the optical components, the transmission FMF, the EDF and their coupling, we experimentally demonstrate the first weakly-coupled MDM-WDM amplification and transmission over 15-km 2-mode FMF with 10-Gb/s optical on-off keying (OOK) modulation and direct detection. The proposed FM-EDFA can be extended to MDM transmission systems and networks supporting more modes.
ISSN:0733-8724
1558-2213
DOI:10.1109/JLT.2020.3001008