Effects of Random Perturbations in Plastic Optical Fibers
A. F. Garito,
J. Wang,
R. Gao
REVIEW
The most important feature of an optical fiber waveguide is its
bandwidth, which defines its information-carrying capacity. A major
limitation on the bandwidth of multimode glass and plastic optical
fibers is modal dispersion, in which different optical modes propagate
at different velocities and the dispersion grows linearly with length.
However, in plastic optical fibers, experimental and theoretical
results indicate that the modes are not independent but are highly
coupled, which leads to a characteristic square-root length dependence
and an unanticipated large enhancement of the bandwidth to gigahertz
levels. The ever increasing demands for low-cost, high-bandwidth
communications media for voice, video, and data transmission in short-
and medium-distance applications are generating a new assessment of
multimode optical fibers to serve as high-speed fiber links.
The authors are in the Department of Physics and Astronomy,
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
