- Developed an optical fiber having 36 cores and employing three-mode propagation for all cores.
- 108 parallel transmission paths in a single optical fiber using multiple cores and multiple modes.
- Opening up the possibility of transmission at 10 petabits per second in the future.
NICT, together with Sumitomo Electric Industries, Ltd. (Sumitomo Electric, President: Masayoshi Matsumoto), Yokohama National University (YNU, President: Yuichi Hasebe), and Optoquest Co. Ltd. (Optoquest, President: Noboru Higashi), developed a new type of optical fiber having 36 cores, the world's highest number, all employing multimode propagation, demonstrating the first successful experiment of sending and receiving optical signals.
Research is going on worldwide in the field of multicore fibers or multimode fiber transmission as a next-generation technology for increasing the transmission capacity per optical fiber. In the research reported here, we adopted three modes for all cores, realizing 36 × 3 = 108 spatial channels per single optical fiber. The success of this experiment opens up the possibility of transmission at 10 petabits per second with a single optical fiber.