Design of eight-mode polarization-maintaining few-mode fiber for multiple-input multiple-output-free spatial division multiplexing.

We propose a polarization-maintaining few-mode fiber (FMF) that features an elliptical ring shaped core with a high refractive index contrast ∼0.03 between the core and the cladding. This fiber design alleviates the usual trade-off between the number of guided modes and the achievable birefringence that is usually observed in conventional elliptical-core FMFs. Through numerical simulations, we show that this fiber design can support up to 10 guided vector modes over the entire C band while providing large birefringence. Except for the two fundamental modes, the eight higher-order vector modes are all separated from their adjacent modes by effective index differences >10⁻⁴, which is the typical birefringence value of single-mode polarization maintaining fibers. The designed fiber targets applications in spatial division multiplexing of optical channels, without multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) digital signal processing, for short-reach optical interconnects.