title: Long distance transmission in few-mode fibers.
abstract: Using multimode fibers for long-haul transmission is proposed and demonstrated experimentally. In particular few-mode fibers (FMFs) are demonstrated as a good compromise since they are sufficiently resistant to mode coupling compared to standard multimode fibers but they still can have large core diameters compared to single-mode fibers. As a result these fibers can have significantly less nonlinearity and at the same time they can have the same performance as single-mode fibers in terms of dispersion and loss. In the absence of mode coupling it is possible to use these fibers in the single-mode operation where all the data is carried in only one of the spatial modes throughout the fiber. It is shown experimentally that the single-mode operation is achieved simply by splicing single-mode fibers to both ends of a 35-km-long dual-mode fiber at 1310 nm. After 35 km of transmission, no modal dispersion or excess loss was observed. Finally the same fiber is placed in a recirculating loop and 3 WDM channels each carrying 6 Gb/s BPSK data were transmitted through 1050 km of the few-mode fiber without modal dispersion.
authors.affiliation: College of Optics and Photonics/CREOL&FPCE, University of Central Florida, 4000 Central Florida Blvd, Orlando 32816-2700, Florida, USA.
authors.forename: Fatih
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Yaman
authors.forename: Neng
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Bai
authors.forename: Benyuan
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.forename: Ting
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Guifang
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Li