Optical Fibres
The chapter starts with the fundamentals of light propagation in optical fibers, followed by the essentials of fiber fabrication. Subsequent sections focus on typical loss and dispersion characteristics of single- and multimode fibers including relevant i
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Optical Fibers Pascale Nouchi, Pierre Sillard, and Denis Molin
Abstract The chapter starts with the fundamentals of light propagation in optical fibers, followed by the essentials of fiber fabrication. Subsequent sections focus on typical loss and dispersion characteristics of single- and multimode fibers including relevant information on standardization. The basic elements of fiber cables for various applications constitute another topic followed by new developments such as microstructured and Bragg fibers, hybrid devices combining glass fibers and semiconductors, and multicore and multimode fibers as well.
2.1 Introduction Within the past 40 years, optical fibers have evolved from a not-so-transparent glass tube to an extraordinarily efficient transmission medium, now acknowledged as a central element of modern telecommunication networks. Who could have imagined then, that by now several hundred million kilometers of fibers would have been installed worldwide, allowing today’s highly sophisticated World Wide Web (WWW) to link the whole planet in real time? Since the first proposition of using glass fibers as a data transmission medium in 1966 [1], optical fibers have had an extremely dynamic development, always sustaining the evolution of transmission systems and the growing needs for bandwidth. It is the purpose of this chapter to give the reader some basic knowledge about optical fibers: How are they fabricated? What are the key characteristics and what P. Nouchi (¬) THALES Research and Technology France, Campus Polytechnique, 1 Avenue Augustin Fresnel, 91767 Palaiseau Cedex, France e-mail: [email protected] P. Sillard D. Molin Prysmian Group, Site Data 4, Route de Nozay, 91460 Marcoussis, France e-mail: [email protected], [email protected]
H. Venghaus, N. Grote (eds.), Fibre Optic Communication – Key Devices Optical Sciences 161. DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-20517-0_2, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012
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are the different optical fibers? What are the latest innovations? This chapter is thus organized as follows: The first section includes some fiber basics to give the reader a very first insight into fiber propagation and to introduce the two main categories of optical fibers, that is, single-mode and multimode. The following two sections are dedicated specifically to multimode and single-mode telecom fibers, respectively. In each of those two sections, we describe in detail key fiber characteristics, the different types of fibers that have been developed over the past few years, and some standardization basics. The subsequent section will shortly present fiber cables for telecom applications, and we will finish with the latest developments on novel optical fibers.
2.2 Fiber Basics 2.2.1 Principle of Light Propagation in Optical Fibers An optical fiber is a thin cylindrical strand of silica glass, consisting of a central core surrounded by a cladding: the core has higher refractive index nco than the surrounding cladding ncl (nco > ncl ),
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