Reaching the pinnacle of high-capacity optical transmission using a standard cladding diameter coupled-core multi-core fiber
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.
Authors
- Nicolas K. Fontaine (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1012-8334)
- Menno van den Hout (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8892-1071)
- Mikael Mazur (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2915-9942)
- Ruben S. Lúıs (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1002-882X)
- Michael J. Withford (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6414-8739)
- Ayumi Inoue
- Benjamin J. Puttnam (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1210-0901)
- Andrew Ross‐Adams (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-5089-8224)
- Simon Gross (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5130-183X)
- Cristian Antonelli (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3353-7889)
- Lauren Dallachiesa (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0040-8941)
- Haoshuo Chen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6637-9346)
- Giammarco Di Sciullo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0006-8286-2377)
- Roland Ryf (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8883-5349)
- Tetsuya Hayashi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0321-3581)
- Chigo Okonkwo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5716-6728)
- Takuji Nagashima (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-9619-790X)
- Georg Rademacher (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9156-6928)
- Jun Sakaguchi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1955-6239)
- Hideaki Furukawa
Institutions
- University of Stuttgart (DE)
- University of L'Aquila (IT)
- Sumitomo Electric Industries (Japan) (JP)
- Nokia (United States) (US)
- Eindhoven University of Technology (NL)
- National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (JP)
- Macquarie University (AU)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2025-04-23
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-59037-1
- Citations
- 18
- Primary Topic
- Optical Network Technologies
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 13.15
Funders
- Technische Universiteit Eindhoven