Ultra-high-definition (UHD) technologies have recently received attention on account of their practical applications in consumer electronics. UHD devices require uncompressed video transmission at a data rate exceeding 100 Gb/s; thus, an optical fiber connection is essential. In consumer applications, optical fibers are very short. Moreover, their connections must permit variations in the fiber alignment, which accommodates rough handling by consumers. Under this condition, the transmitted signal quality is significantly degraded owing to noise and instabilities that strongly depend on the fiber alignment conditions in optical modules and connectors. Therefore, graded-index plastic optical fibers (GI POFs) are promising optical cables for consumer applications because of their flexibility, safety, and high bandwidth. Recently, the authors experimentally demonstrated that GI POFs can reduce interferometric noise, such as modal noise and multipath interference noise, in a multimode fiber link based on a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL). This noise reduction effect results from strong mode coupling of GI POFs, which is closely related to microscopic heterogeneous structures of a core polymer matrix. In this paper, a control method of mode coupling using the copolymerization process for fiber core materials is proposed. The formation of composition fluctuations by copolymerization increases the mode coupling in the GI POF core. It thereby enables highly stable and robust data transmission with a large fiber misalignment tolerance in a VCSEL-based multimode fiber link. The proposed method for mode coupling control is expected to contribute to household optical communication systems in the upcoming UHD era.

中文翻译：

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通过特定共聚工艺实现的低噪声渐变折射率塑料光纤

超高清 (UHD) 技术最近因其在消费电子产品中的实际应用而受到关注。UHD设备需要以超过100 Gb / s的数据速率进行无压缩视频传输；因此，光纤连接是必不可少的。在消费应用中，光纤非常短。此外，它们的连接必须允许光纤排列的变化，以适应消费者的粗暴处理。在这种情况下，由于噪声和不稳定性，传输的信号质量会显着降低，这在很大程度上取决于光模块和连接器中的光纤对准条件。因此，渐变折射率塑料光纤 (GI POF) 因其灵活性、安全性和高带宽而成为用于消费应用的有前途的光缆。最近，作者通过实验证明，GI POF 可以减少基于垂直腔面发射激光器 (VCSEL) 的多模光纤链路中的干涉噪声，例如模态噪声和多径干扰噪声。这种降噪效果源于 GI POF 的强模式耦合，这与核心聚合物基质的微观异质结构密切相关。本文提出了一种利用共聚工艺对纤芯材料进行模式耦合的控制方法。通过共聚形成的组成波动增加了 GI POF 核中的模式耦合。因此，它可以在基于 VCSEL 的多模光纤链路中以较大的光纤未对准容差实现高度稳定和稳健的数据传输。