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All-fiber 6-mode multiplexer composed of two consecutive LP11-mode selective couplers (MSC), two LP21-MSCs and an LP02-MSC is fully characterized by wavelength-swept interferometer technique. The MSCs are fabricated by polished-type fiber couplers coupling LP01 mode of a single mode fiber into a higher-order mode of a few mode fiber. A pair of the mode multiplexers has minimum mode dependent loss of 4 dB and high mode group selectivity of over 15 dB. Mode division multiplexed transmission enabled by the all-fiber mode multiplexers is demonstrated over fiber spans of 117 km employing an in-line multi-mode optical amplifier. 6 modes of 120 Gb/s dual polarization quadrature phase shift keying signals combined with 30 wavelength channels are successfully transmitted.

We propose all-fiber mode multiplexer composed of two consecutive LP11 mode selective couplers that allows for the multiplexing of LP01 mode and two-fold degenerate LP11 modes. We demonstrate WDM transmission of 32 wavelength channels with 100 GHz spacing, each carrying 3 modes of 120 Gb/s polarization division multiplexed quadrature phase shifted keying (PDM-QPSK) signal, over 560 km of few-mode fiber (FMF). Long distance transmission is achieved by 6 x 6 multiple-input multiple-output digital signal processing and modal differential group delay compensated link of FMF. The all-fiber mode multiplexer has considerable potential to be used in mode- and wavelength-division multiplexed transmission. (C) 2015 Optical Society of America

We demonstrate the first all-fiber mode-group-selective photonic lantern using multimode graded-index fibers. Mode selectivity for mode groups LP(01), LP(11) and LP(21)+LP(02) is 20-dB, 10-dB and 7-dB respectively. The insertion loss when butt coupled to multimode graded-index fiber is below 0.6-dB. The use of the multimode graded-index fibers in the taper can significantly reduce the adiabaticity requirement.

We study intermodal four-wave mixing (FWM) in few-mode fibers in the presence of birefringence fluctuations and random linear mode coupling. Two different intermodal FWM processes are investigated by including all nonlinear contributions to the phase-matching condition and FWM bandwidth. We find that one of the FWM processes has a much larger bandwidth than the other. We include random linear mode coupling among fiber modes using three different models based on an analysis of the impact of random coupling on differences of propagation constants between modes. We find that random coupling always reduces the FWM efficiency relative to its vale in the absence of linear coupling. The reduction factor is relatively small (about 3 dB) when only a few modes are linearly coupled but can become very large (> 40 dB) when all modes couple strongly. In the limit of a coupling length much shorter than the nonlinear length, intermodal FWM efficiency becomes vanishingly small. These results should prove useful in the context of space-division multiplexing with few-mode and multimode fibers.

Spatial light modulation can be used to address specific fiber modes, as required in mode-division multiplexed systems. We theoretically compare phase-only spatial light modulation to a combination of amplitude and phase spatial light modulation in terms of insertion loss and crosstalk for a fiber supporting 11 LP modes. We experimentally demonstrate selective mode excitation using a Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCoS) spatial light modulator configured to as phase and amplitude modulator.

We investigate the use of “photonic lanterns” as adiabatic mode converters for space-division multiplexing (SDM) systems to interface multiple single-mode fibers to a multi-mode fiber. In a SDM system, minimizing the coupling loss and mode-dependent loss best utilizes all spatial modes of the fiber which increases the capacity, the transmission distance, and minimizes the outage probability. We use modal analysis, the beam propagation method, and a transfer matrix technique to analyze the lanterns throughput along with its mode dependent loss and show that unitary coupling between single-mode fibers and a multi-mode fiber is only possible by optimizing the arrangements of the cores. Results include simulations for three, 12, 15, and 51 core lanterns to couple to six, 24, 30, and 102 spatial and polarization modes, respectively.

Mode division multiplexed optical transmission enabled by all-fiber mode multiplexer is investigated. The proposed all-fiber mode multiplexer is composed of consecutive mode selective couplers. It multiplexes or demultiplexes LP01, LP11, LP21, and LP02 modes simultaneously. We demonstrate successful transmission of three spatial modes with 120 Gb/s PDM-QPSK signals over 15 km of four mode fiber by using 6x6 MIMO digital signal processing. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America

We demonstrate a 3x1 fiber-based photonic lantern spatial-multiplexer with mode-selectivity greater than 6 dB and transmission loss of less than 0.3 dB. The total insertion loss of the mode-selective multiplexers when coupled to a graded-index few-mode fiber was < 2 dB. These mode multiplexers showed mode-dependent loss below 0.5 dB. To our knowledge these are the lowest insertion and mode-dependent loss devices, which are also fully compatible with conventional few-mode fiber technology and broadband operation.

Mode-division multiplexing over 33-km few-mode fiber is investigated. It is shown that 6×6 MIMO processing can be used to almost completely compensate for crosstalk and intersymbol interference due to mode coupling in a system that transmits uncorrelated 28-GBaud QPSK signals on the six spatial and polarization modes supported by a novel few-mode fiber.