Design of PANDA ring-core fiber with 10 polarization-maintaining modes

We present a polarization-maintaining PANDA ring-core fiber(PM-PRCF) characterized by the combination of a ring-core structure with two stress-applying rods. This special fiber design separates the adjacent modes and avoids the cutoff of the higher-order modes, which is a common problem in elliptical core polarization-maintaining few-mode fibers. Using a high-contrast index ring and stress-induced birefringence, the PM-PRCF features support for 10 vector modes, with effective refractive index separations from their adjacent modes >10.Broadband performance is investigated subsequently over a wide wavelength range from 1500 to 1630 nm.The proposed fiber is targeted at applications in space-division multiplexing while eliminating the complex multiple-input multiple-output signal processing.