Supermodes for optical transmission

In this paper, the concept of supermode is introduced for long-distance optical transmission systems. The supermodes exploit coupling between the cores of a multi-core fiber, in which the core-to-core distance is much shorter than that in conventional multi-core fiber. The use of supermodes leads to a larger mode effective area and higher mode density than the conventional multi-core fiber. Through simulations, we show that the proposed coupled multi-core fiber allows lower modal dependent loss, mode coupling and differential modal group delay than few-mode fibers. These properties suggest that the coupled multi-core fiber could be a good candidate for both spatial division multiplexing and single-mode operation. (C) 2011 Optical Society of America