Ricardo Soeiro, Tiago Alves and Adolfo Cartaxo, researchers from the Optical Communications and Photonics Group from IT in Lisbon, were distinguished with the Best Paper Award for their work “On the Probability Density Function of Inter-core Crosstalk Power in Birefringent Homogeneous Multi-core Fibers”, in the 6th International Conference on Photonics, Optics and Laser Technology – PHOTOPTICS 2018 (http://www.photoptics.org/?y=2018), held in Funchal, Madeira, from 25-27 January.

The increasing traffic provisioning demands are pushing the transmission capacity to its limit. Multi-core fibers (MCFs) have been reported as a promising technology to relax capacity constraints since each core comprising the MCF can be used as an individual transmission channel. In MCFs, the occurrence of high power levels of interference (crosstalk) between cores can be a major capacity limitation. “The paper investigates the crosstalk statistics and the distribution of the crosstalk power between the polarization directions in MCFs. This study is useful for the characterization of next-generation optical communications systems based on MCFs”, explained Tiago Alves

On the photo, from left to right: Adolfo Cartaxo, Ricardo Soeiro and Tiago Alves