A theoretical and experimental study on the response of Brillouin scattering in multi-core optical fibers (MCF) under different curving conditions is presented. Results demonstrate that the Brillouin frequency shift of the off-center cores in MCF is highly bending-dependent, showing a linear dependence on the fiber curvature. This feature is here exploited to develop a new kind of distributed optical fiber sensor, which provides measurements of a distributed profile mapping the longitudinal fiber shape. Using conventional Brillouin optical time-domain analysis with differential pulse-width pairs, fully distributed shape sensing along a 1 km-long MCF is practically demonstrated. Experimental results show a very good agreement with the theoretically expected behavior deduced from the dependence of the Brillouin frequency on the strain induced by the fiber bending over a given core. The analysis and results presented in this paper constitute the first demonstration of distributed bending sensing, providing the cornerstone to further develop it into a fully distributed three-dimensional shape sensor.

We report a highly sensitive fiber-optic sensor based on two cascaded intrinsic fiber Fabry-Perot interferometers (IFFPIs). The cascaded IFFPIs have different free spectral ranges (FSRs) and are formed by a short section of hollow core photonic crystal fiber sandwiched by two single mode fibers. With the superposition of reflective spectrum with different FSRs, the Vernier effect will be generated in the proposed sensor and we found that the strain sensitivity of the proposed sensor can be improved from 1.6 pm/με for a single IFFPI sensor to 47.14 pm/με by employing the Vernier effect. The sensor embed with a metglas ribbon can be also used to measure the magnetic field according to the similar principle. The sensitivity of the magnetic field measurement is achieved to be 71.57 pm/Oe that is significantly larger than the 2.5 pm/Oe for a single IFFPI sensor.

We experimentally propose and demonstrate homodyne coherent detection in a short-distance data center interconnect with bidirectional fiber transmission. The transmitter in the proposed system sends the modulated signal and a continuous wave (CW) tone originating from the same laser diode (LD) over the 2 lanes of a duplex fiber to the remote receiver for coherent detection. Thus, this system allows the use of an uncooled LD with a large linewidth and reduces the complexity of digital signal processing (DSP) compared to that in a classical coherent system. A successful real-time demonstration with 600-Gb/s DP-64QAM using uncooled large-linewidth DFB lasers is conducted. Automatic stabilization against polarization fluctuations of the transmitted tone is achieved by the proposed polarization-tracking integrated coherent receiver in compact silicon photonics (SiP), tracking up to 300 rad/s without a performance penalty. The phase noise caused by mismatch and the link loss budget limitations are discussed and analyzed. This study shows that the proposed system is a potentially attractive solution for future 800G and 1.6T intra-data-center optical interconnects.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a directional torsion sensor based on a Mach-Zehnder interferometer formed in a multicore fiber (MCF) with a ~570-μm-long helical structure (HS). The HS was fabricated into the MCF by simply pre-twisting and then heating with a CO₂ laser splicing system. This device shows the capability of directional torsion measurement from −17.094 rad/m to 15.669 rad/m with the sensitivity of ~0.118 nm/(rad/m). Moreover, since the multiple interferences respond differently to torsion and temperature simultaneously, the temperature cross-sensitivity of the proposed sensor can be eliminated effectively. Besides, the sensor owns other merits such as easy fabrication and good mechanical robustness.

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel interference fading suppression method for phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometry (φ-OTDR) using space-division multiplexed (SDM) pulse probes in a few-mode fiber. The SDM probes consist of multiple different modes, and three spatial modes (LP01, LP11a, and LP11b) are used in this work for the proof of concept. Firstly, the Rayleigh backscattering light of different modes is experimentally characterized, and it turns out that the waveforms of the φ-OTDR traces for distinct modes are all different and independent. Thanks to the spatial difference of the fading positions for distinct modes, multiple probes from spatially multiplexed modes can be used to suppress the interference fading in φ-OTDR. Then, the performances of the φ-OTDR systems using a single probe and multiple probes are evaluated and compared. Specifically, the statistical analysis shows that the fading probabilities over both the fiber length and the time scale are reduced significantly by using multiple SDM probes, which verifies the significant performance improvement on fading suppression. By introducing the concept of SDM to φ-OTDR, the proposed novel interference fading suppression method avoids the complicated frequency or phase modulation, which has the advantages of simplicity, good effectiveness and high reliability.

Towards the next generation optical access network supporting large capacity data transmission to enormous number of users covering a wider area, we proposed a hybrid wavelength-space division multiplexing (WSDM) optical access network architecture utilizing multicore fibers with advanced modulation formats. As a proof of concept, we experimentally demonstrated a WSDM optical access network with duplex transmission using our developed and fabricated multicore (7-core) fibers with 58.7km distance. As a cost-effective modulation scheme for access network, the optical OFDM-QPSK signal has been intensity modulated on the downstream transmission in the optical line terminal (OLT) and it was directly detected in the optical network unit (ONU) after MCF transmission. 10 wavelengths with 25GHz channel spacing from an optical comb generator are employed and each wavelength is loaded with 5Gb/s OFDM-QPSK signal. After amplification, power splitting, and fan-in multiplexer, 10-wavelength downstream signal was injected into six outer layer cores simultaneously and the aggregation downstream capacity reaches 300 Gb/s. −16 dBm sensitivity has been achieved for 3.8 × 10⁻³ bit error ratio (BER) with 7% Forward Error Correction (FEC) limit for all wavelengths in every core. Upstream signal from ONU side has also been generated and the bidirectional transmission in the same core causes negligible performance degradation to the downstream signal. As a universal platform for wired/wireless data access, our proposed architecture provides additional dimension for high speed mobile signal transmission and we hence demonstrated an upstream delivery of 20Gb/s per wavelength with QPSK modulation formats using the inner core of MCF emulating a mobile backhaul service. The IQ modulated data was coherently detected in the OLT side. −19 dBm sensitivity has been achieved under the FEC limit and more than 18 dB power budget is guaranteed.