Amplification sharing of non-degenerate modes in an elliptical-core few-mode erbium-doped fiber.

We report on the study of a possible first step integration of mode division multiplexed optical component for single-mode fiber networks. State-of-the-art on few-mode erbium-doped fiber amplifiers is used to integrate the amplification function in a single component, which is expected to save energy in comparison to parallelized active components. So as to limit the impact of modal cross-talk, an elliptical-core few-mode erbium-doped fiber has been used to assemble an amplifier sharing setup for different single mode fibers, using non-degenerate modes. With this simple setup, we show the level of performances that can be reached for cross-talk, gain, differential modal gain and losses and discuss the ways to improve them for a possible integration in a real network. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America