Beyond the bandwidth-length product: Graded index microstructured polymer optical fiber

Abstract

Large core multimode polymer fibers for high data rate transmission are an important growth area. The conventional approach to reducing the intermodal dispersion in such fibers is to use a graded index (GI) profile. More recently, microstructures rather than differences in chemical composition have been used to produce the GI structure. We compare the bandwidth performance of two GI microstructured fibers to a conventional GI fiber made from the same material. The microstructured fibers not only show excellent bandwidth performance but also their bandwidth has an unconventional length dependence: no additional pulse broadening beyond a characteristic length.