TY - JOUR
T1 - Reaching the pinnacle of high-capacity optical transmission using a standard cladding diameter coupled-core multi-core fiber
AU - van den Hout, Menno
AU - S. Luís, Ruben
AU - Puttnam, Benjamin J.
AU - Di Sciullo, Giammarco
AU - Hayashi, Tetsuya
AU - Inoue, Ayumi
AU - Nagashima, Takuji
AU - Gross, Simon
AU - Ross-Adams, Andrew
AU - Withford, Michael J.
AU - Dallachiesa, Lauren
AU - Fontaine, Nicolas K.
AU - Ryf, Roland
AU - Mazur, Mikael
AU - Chen, Haoshuo
AU - Sakaguchi, Jun
AU - Antonelli, Cristian
AU - Okonkwo, Chigo
AU - Furukawa, Hideaki
AU - Rademacher, Georg
N1 - Copyright the Author(s) 2025. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.
PY - 2025
Y1 - 2025
N2 - Data rates in optical networks have grown exponentially in recent decades and are expected to grow beyond the fundamental limits of current standard single-mode fiber networks. As such, novel transmission technologies are required to sustain this growth, and space-division multiplexing provides the most promising candidate to scale the capacity of optical networks in a way that is also cost-effective. For fiber fabrication and deployment, it is highly beneficial to use fibers with a standard cladding diameter. Here we demonstrate petabit-per-second-class data transmission using a space-division multiplexing fiber that approaches the limits of spatial multiplexing whilst minimizing the required signal processing complexity. This is done by designing and fabricating a low-loss 19-core multi-core fiber with randomly-coupled cores, a standard cladding diameter, and supporting a wideband wavelength-division multiplexed signal. The resulting data rate of 1.7 petabit/s is the highest reported amongst standard cladding diameter multi-core fibers and is approximately more than an order of magnitude higher than is supported by currently deployed single-mode fibers, paving the way for next-generation ultra-fast optical transmission networks.
AB - Data rates in optical networks have grown exponentially in recent decades and are expected to grow beyond the fundamental limits of current standard single-mode fiber networks. As such, novel transmission technologies are required to sustain this growth, and space-division multiplexing provides the most promising candidate to scale the capacity of optical networks in a way that is also cost-effective. For fiber fabrication and deployment, it is highly beneficial to use fibers with a standard cladding diameter. Here we demonstrate petabit-per-second-class data transmission using a space-division multiplexing fiber that approaches the limits of spatial multiplexing whilst minimizing the required signal processing complexity. This is done by designing and fabricating a low-loss 19-core multi-core fiber with randomly-coupled cores, a standard cladding diameter, and supporting a wideband wavelength-division multiplexed signal. The resulting data rate of 1.7 petabit/s is the highest reported amongst standard cladding diameter multi-core fibers and is approximately more than an order of magnitude higher than is supported by currently deployed single-mode fibers, paving the way for next-generation ultra-fast optical transmission networks.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=105003302372&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1038/s41467-025-59037-1
DO - 10.1038/s41467-025-59037-1
M3 - Article
C2 - 40268902
AN - SCOPUS:105003302372
SN - 2041-1723
VL - 16
SP - 1
EP - 8
JO - Nature Communications
JF - Nature Communications
M1 - 3833
ER -