Design and analysis of a weakly coupled few-mode hollow-core U-shaped tube nested antiresonant fiber

Abstract

In this work, we proposed a weakly coupled few-mode hollow-core U-shaped tube nested antiresonant fiber (FM-UARF) for the potential large-capacity mode-division multiplexing transmission without multiple-in-multiple-out (MIMO) digital signal processing. Through theoretical analysis and numerical simulation, the six-tube FM-UARF can be a good candidate for two-mode and three-mode transmission with better performance. After parameter optimization, the weakly coupled condition of effective refractive index difference (Δneff) larger than 5×10−4 can be achieved. Under the two-mode case, the confinement loss (CL) of the LP01 and LP11 modes is less than 0.005 dB/km and 0.1 dB/km in the 700 nm bandwidth range (0.9−1.6µm), respectively. In addition, LP01 achieves the lowest CL of 0.00038 dB/km at a wavelength of 1.06 µm, which gives it potential applications in high-power laser transmission. Under the three-mode case, the CL of the LP01, LP11, and LP21 modes are less than 0.006 dB/km, 0.1 dB/km, and 10 dB/km, respectively, in the wavelength range of 0.95 to 1.65 µm. Both the CL ratios are larger than 150 (23 dB), which ensures the high purity of the supported fiber modes. The results show that the proposed FM-UARF with optimized parameters has the potential in the MIMO-less large-capacity data transmission and so on.