Infinity Additive Manufacturing of Polarization Maintaining Fibers for THz Communications

Abstract

A polarization-maintaining fiber was developed for communication applications within multi-channel and polarization-division multiplexing modalities. The fiber was designed for signal transmission at 128 GHz carrier frequency. It was 3D printed using a 35° inclined nozzle that enables length-unlimited fabrication of terahertz fibers featuring complex transverse geometries. More importantly, a significant reduction (~25%-40%) in fiber transmission loss was achieved after annealing the fabricated fiber at a temperature close to its melting point, resulting in the reduced fiber losses (by power) approaching ~5-10 dB and ~7-11 dB over 110–150 GHz for the two orthogonally polarized modes. The communication demonstrates show that the signal transmission with bit error rates of ~10-11-10-5 was supported at 128 GHz over 1–6 Gbps by the two orthogonal modes of the annealed fiber. The experimental characterization demonstrated the promising prospect of such a novel technique for the fabrication of advanced THz fibers for fiber-assisted communication applications.