Amplifying Orbital Angular Momentum Modes in Ring-Core Erbium-Doped Fiber

Jun Liu; Shi Chen; Hongya Wang; Shuang Zheng; Long Zhu; Andong Wang; Lulu Wang; Cheng Du; Jian Wang

doi:10.34133/2020/7623751

Amplifying Orbital Angular Momentum Modes in Ring-Core Erbium-Doped Fiber

Research (Wash D C). 2020 Feb 20:2020:7623751. doi: 10.34133/2020/7623751. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Jun Liu¹, Shi Chen¹, Hongya Wang¹, Shuang Zheng¹, Long Zhu¹, Andong Wang¹, Lulu Wang¹, Cheng Du², Jian Wang¹

Affiliations

¹ Wuhan National Laboratory for Optoelectronics and School of Optical and Electronic Information, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, 430074 Hubei, China.
² Fiberhome Telecommunication Technologies Co. Ltd., Wuhan 430074, China.

Abstract

Lots of research efforts have been devoted to increase the transmission capacity in optical communications using orbital angular momentum (OAM) multiplexing. To enable long-haul OAM mode transmission, an in-line OAM fiber amplifier is desired. A ring-core fiber (RCF) is considered to be a preferable design for stable OAM mode propagation in the fiber. Here, we demonstrate an OAM fiber amplifier based on a fabricated ring-core erbium-doped fiber (RC-EDF). We characterize the performance of the RC-EDF-assisted OAM fiber amplifier and demonstrate its use in OAM multiplexing communications with OAM modes carrying quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals. The amplification of two OAM modes over four wavelengths is demonstrated in a data-carrying OAM-division multiplexing and wavelength-division multiplexing system. The obtained results show favorable performance of the RC-EDF-assisted OAM fiber amplifier. These demonstrations may open up new perspectives for long-haul transmission in capacity scaling fiber-optic communications employing OAM modes.