Anti-resonant hollow-core fiber-based simultaneous transmission of >4 Tbit/s 64-QAM-DMT co-WDM bidirectional signal and 10 W laser power

Power-over-fiber (PoF) is an attractive approach to feed certain optoelectronic/electrical devices in optical access network, which could facilitate the power supply installation and operation for remote sites. In this Letter, by virtue of two low-loss windows of anti-resonant hollow-core fiber (AR-HCF), a C-band full-duplex co-wavelength bidirectional link based on intensity-modulation and direct-detection (IM/DD) is experimentally co-propagated with 10 W laser power at 1064 nm over 3 km AR-HCF. Twenty-two co-wavelength channels spacing of ITU 100 GHz grid in both up and down streams, each carrying 64-level quadrature amplitude modulation discrete multitone (64-QAM-DMT) modulation signal is successfully demonstrated with error-free operation at the 7% hard-decision forward error correction (HD-FEC) threshold. Such a shared scenario supports a 4.64 Tbit/s bidirectional data transmission along with the optical power transmission efficiency (OPTE) of 24.7%, achieving the record-breaking optical power-bit-rate-distance performance of 34.38 W⋅Tbit/s⋅km. The results indicate hollow-core fiber-based signal and power co-transmission has enormous potential for future high-energy-efficiency and high-spectral-efficiency PoF-passive optical network (PON).