Measurement of fiber parameters of pure silica core fibers based on the OTDR technique.

We propose a simple technique based on optical time domain reflectometry (OTDR) for measuring the cutoff wavelength and core radius distributions in a pure silica core fiber for the first time. The proposed technique can simultaneously measure several important fiber parameters such as the mode field diameter, relative-index difference, effective area, and chromatic dispersion, including the cutoff wavelength and core radius. We experimentally demonstrate that our proposed technique can successfully evaluate these fiber parameter distributions and can be applied for the measurements of few-mode and multi-core fibers with pure silica cores using multi-channel OTDR and mode couplers.

Loss measurement of each mode in few-mode fiber links with crosstalk-inducing points based on optical time domain reflectometry.

We propose a novel technique based on optical time domain reflectometry for characterizing the losses of transmission modes along few-mode fiber links. The technique estimates the transfer matrix at a crosstalk-inducing point from the measured backscattered waveforms and then eliminates the crosstalk influence of the point on the waveforms. Waveforms that are free from the crosstalk influence enable us to obtain the true losses independently of the crosstalk-inducing point.

Rayleigh-based OTDR with dynamic modal crosstalk suppression.

We propose and demonstrate a novel approach for measuring the modal attenuation of the splice loss of a purely LP mode group by using a Rayleigh-based OTDR with a dynamic modal crosstalk (XT) suppression technique for few-mode fibers (FMFs). With the proposed approach, the Brillouin loss interaction with a Brillouin Stokes beam co-propagating with the OTDR probe removes the modal XT caused at the modal conversion point and suppresses the accumulated modal XT that is detected. A preliminary experiment is demonstrated using spliced FMFs with a core-offset.