Intermodal and Multimode Fiber Photonics

This special topic focuses on advances in fiber waveguides with more than one spatial mode or multiple cores. It has been recognized that in the last decade several of the current single mode fibre-based technologies are facing impending fundamental limitations in many technological areas. Modern coherent telecommunications systems are reaching their capacity limits in single mode transmission fibers, and schematics involving encoding information in multiple spatial modes of single/multiple cores of a single fiber are being pursued. Power scaling of fiber lasers and amplifiers necessitates the use of very large mode area fibers, which has entailed either the management or the use of higher order modes. Multi-parameter sensing has led to the development of multicore fibers that can simultaneously and separably sense bend, position, and shape. Imaging with and/or through fibers has exploited the spatial degree of freedom afforded by modes of fibers. Finally, emerging work on higher-order-mode as well as intermodal nonlinearities points to new degrees of freedom for nonlinear optics as well as a potential impairment in communications and high-power lasers.

Guest Editors: Francesca Parmigiani and Siddharth Ramachandran