Abstract

The most effective way to increase the transmission capacity of an optical fiber communication system is to explore the extremely wide bandwidth of the optical fiber and feed as many wavelength channels as practicable into the fiber. The trend has been to extend the communication window from the C-Band to the L-Band and the S-Band to cover a total range of 200 nm. Nonlinear effects, in particular, the Raman effect, which cannot be managed with dispersion, will become a major concern in the development of ultra-wide-band dense WDM systems. A direct way to suppress such nonlinear effects is to use a fiber with a large effective core area. Recently, we analyzed a new fiber structure, a fiber that has a segmented cladding.¹ This segmented cladding fiber (SCF) can offer single-mode operation over an extended range of wavelengths with a large core area. In this aspect, the SCF behaves like a photonic-crystal fiber or holey fiber.^2,3 Unlike a holey fiber, however, the SCF uses a small index contrast (same as that of a conventional fiber) and, hence, has potentially low polarization-mode dispersion, which is essential for high-bit-rate transmission. The chromatic dispersion of the SCF is also expected to be similar to that of a conventional fiber, which can be controlled using conventional techniques. In this paper, we present an analysis of a 50 µm-core SCF that is single-moded over the extended communication window as an example to demonstrate the potential of the fiber for ultra-wide-band, ultra-high-bit-rate, dense WDM systems.

© 2002 Optical Society of America