Riya Kothari

With global data demand growing at an unprecedented pace, finding new ways to scale optical communication systems has become more important than ever. Space-division multiplexing (SDM) is one of the most promising technologies in this space, pushing data transmission capacities to the petabits-per-second range by using multiple spatial paths within a single fiber.

A key focus of current research is to make these systems not just faster, but also more energy-efficient and sustainable. In particular, we investigate the randomly-coupled multi-core fibers (RC-MCFs) — a type of SDM fiber that allows high data rates with relatively modest increases in signal processing requirements. What's especially exciting is the potential to use these same fibers not just for communication, but also for distributed sensing, enabling a new class of fiber networks that can transmit massive amounts of data while also monitoring the environment in real-time.