JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 23, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2005
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Guest Editorial Special Issue on Optical Fibers
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S guest editors, we are pleased to present the JOURNAL LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY Special Issue on Optical Fibers. This issue was intended to compile the novel topics as well as to review some of the outstanding advances that have been witnessed in the field of optical fibers in recent years. We have particularly focused on the area of Novel Optical Fibers, including those passive or active, for transmission or additional functionalities, managing dispersion and/or nonlinearity, with conventional or holey structure, and silicate-based or of alternative material, as well as issues on high power management. As a result, many excellent papers on various topics—22 papers including nine invited papers—have been put together: enough to reflect on the overall current status of the field of optical fibers. It may not be an overstatement at all that optical fibers have been one of the most fundamental technologies for optical communications. Indeed, the performance of optical fibers has constantly been the central issue in the evolutions of optical communication technologies—not only a very low loss transmission characteristic but numerous properties such as optical amplification, dispersion, and nonlinear management over a wide wavelength range as well. As we look into each of the papers in this special issue, we will learn how the optical fibers are such fundamental yet evolving technologies for the future. Looking back to their history, the first main goal of optical fibers, in the early 1970s, was loss reduction and single-mode operation, which was critical for the realization of optical communications. Then, the second phase was to develop dispersion shifted fibers (DSFs), matching the zero dispersion wavelength with the lowest loss wavelength in order to increase the data rates and system reach. In the meantime (the late 1980s), the advent of optical fiber amplifiers has led to the wideband operation of the dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) transmissions in which the nonlinearity and dispersion were to be optimized over a wide wavelength range. Raman amplification in optical fibers has also been demonstrated to exhibit great advantages for broadband, high-capacity, and long-haul transmissions. Therefore, the design issues of optical fibers became highly sophisticated by now, accounting for dispersion, nonlinearity, Raman amplification performance, water absorption, and polarization mode dispersion, and the wavelength dependence OF
of these, while maintaining the basic properties such as low macro-bending loss, repeatability, cost issues, and single-mode operation over the entire band of interest. The next challenge that we are now facing would be adding further functionalities to optical fibers by making use of novel structures and materials, such as holey fibers, diffraction gratings, and nonsilicate material. In particular, exploitation of fiber nonlinearity for ultrafast optical signal processing should open a new vista onto future massive, highly functional photonic networks. It should also be noted that the penetration of optical communications into the access area, or fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) network, has been dramatically promoted, particularly in Japan, where new requirements to fibers such as low bending loss have to be considered. Likewise, optical fiber technologies are ever evolving technology toward various emerging application fields in the future. We hope that this Special Issue will provide a useful insight of the present status and future outlook of Optical Fibers. We would like to thank Alan Willner, Editor-in-Chief of the JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY for offering us the opportunity to publish this Special Issue, and Douglas Hargis, Publication Coordinator, for his enthusiasm, efficiency, and unfailing helpfulness in its preparation. We are also very grateful to the large team of expert reviewers who, in spite of their busy schedules, undertook the thorough and timely technical review of the manuscripts for this Special Issue. Finally, we would like to thank all of the authors for their support of this Special Issue and for their cooperation in meeting the deadlines so that this Special Issue could meet its scheduled publication date.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/JLT.2005.861239
0733-8724/$20.00 © 2005 IEEE
CHRISTIAN LARSEN, Guest Editor OFS Denmark Brondby, DK-2605 Denmark (e-mail:
[email protected]) DANIEL NOLAN, Guest Editor Corning Inc. Corning, NY 14831 USA (e-mail:
[email protected]) SHU NAMIKI, Guest Editor National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Photonics Research Institute Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8568 Japan (e-mail:
[email protected])
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JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, VOL. 23, NO. 11, NOVEMBER 2005
C. Christen Larsen received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in physics from Copenhagen University, Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1984 and 1987, respectively. From 1984 to 1987, he was with Risø National Laboratory, working towards the Ph.D. degree in solid-state physics: magnetism in rare earths. From 1987, he has worked in the field of fiber optics: first, at LYCOM, which later became Lucent Technologies Denmark, and today, it is OFS Fitel Denmark, Brondby. He is currently vice president of specialty photonics in OFS Fitel Denmark. His research interest has covered single-mode fiber, rare earth doped fibers, dispersion compensating fibers, and fiber componenets.
Daniel A. Nolan (M’88) received the Ph.D. degree in physics from Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), University Park, in 1974, conducting research in the area of surface physics, in particular, the adsorption of particles on metallic surfaces. He joined Corning, Inc., Corning, NY, in 1974, where he initially investigated the formation of color centers and the photokinetic processes in photochromic and polarizing glasses, which contributed to the introduction of Cornings Polarcor polarizing glass. He has authored a number of papers on these subjects in the Journal of Solids, the Journal of the Optical Society of America, the Journal of the American Ceramic Society, and Physical Review. He was responsible for Corning research activities in fiber-based passive components from 1984 to 1992. During this period, a number of important components were investigated and transferred to development, including splitters, taps, wavelength-division multiplexers, variable optical attenuators, switches, devices and amplifier components. In addition, during this time period, Cornings MultiCladTM coupler was introduced. These devices are used throughout the world and almost in all undersea fiber-optic amplified systems. Over the last two decades, he has been involved in the research of optical fiber, fiber-optic components, and polarization and nonlinear optics. His research activities have included the propagation of light in both single-mode and multimode fibers, nonlinear effects in fibers, fiber-optic sensors, and planar and fiber-based passive components for local area networks. He is currently a Research Fellow at Corning Incorporated. From 1991 to 1993, he has been an Associate Editor of Fiber and Integrated Optics, and he has published many articles on fibers and on integrated optics in Optics Letters. He has published five books on the subject of optical fiber and optical components. He edited the book WDM Components (Washington, DC: OSA, 1999) for the Optical Society of America (OSA). He holds 50 U.S. patents. Dr. Nolan is also a Fellow of the OSA. He has presented invited papers on passive components at the Optical Fiber Conference (OFC) (1991 to 1993) and has taught a course on passive components at this conference (1993 and 1994). He has been a Member of committees for important fiber-optic-related conferences, such as OFC (1991–1993), Integrated Photonics Research (IPR) (1992–1994), the Conference on Laser and Electro-Optics (CLEO) (1989–1990 and 2000–2003), and the European Conference on Optical Communications (2000–2003). He has also presented numerous papers at the OFC, IPR, and the European Conference on Optical Communication (ECOC). He was an Associate Editor of the IEEE PHOTONICS TECHNOLOGY LETTERS from 1990 to 1995. He is on the Steering Committee for the JOURNAL OF LIGHTWAVE TECHNOLOGY, in which he has published many articles on fibers and on integrated optics, as well as in other IEEE and OSA publications. He received Corning’s Outstanding Publication award in 1989 and Cornings prestigious Stookey for Exploratory Research in 1995. He received an Outstanding Alumni Award from the College of Science at Penn State in 2001 for contributions to the field of optical communications. He received an IR100 award for the invention of the infrared polarizing glass PolarcorTM.
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Shu Namiki received the B.E., M.S., and Dr. Sci. degrees in physics and applied physics from Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan, in 1986, 1988, and 1998, respectively. He joined Furukawa Electric Co., Ltd. in 1988, where he has developed award-winning highpower pump laser packaging technologies. From 1994 to 1997, he was a visiting scientist at the optics group of the Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, where he studied nonlinear solitary waves in fibers. After returning to Furukawa from MIT, he was engaged, as a principal research scientist, in research on next-generation devices for WDM and/or OTDM networks such as ultrashort optical pulse sources, fiber Raman amplifiers, EDFAs, and nonlinear fiberoptic devices. In 2005, he joined the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), where he is a senior research scientist with the Information Photonics Group. He has co-authored more than 100 conference presentations, papers, book chapters, articles, and patents. Dr. Namiki served as a general co-chair to the OAA conference in 2004. He currently serves as an associate editor for Optics Express and an editor of the IEICE Transactions on Communications. He is also a technical program committee member for OFC, ECOC, and CLEO. He is a member of OSA, IEICE, the Japan Society of Applied Physics, and IEEE LEOS.
