fiber-optic communication Fiber-optic communication is a method of transmitting information from one place to another by sending pulses of infrared light through an optical fiber. The light is a form of carrier wave that is modulated to carry information. Fiber is pref ...

, an intramodal dispersion, is a category of

dispersion Dispersion may refer to: Economics and finance *Dispersion (finance), a measure for the statistical distribution of portfolio returns *Price dispersion, a variation in prices across sellers of the same item *Wage dispersion, the amount of variatio ...

that occurs within a

single mode optical fiber In fiber-optic communication, a single-mode optical fiber (SMF), also known as fundamental- or mono-mode, is an optical fiber designed to carry only a single mode of light - the transverse mode. Modes are the possible solutions of the Helmhol ...

. This dispersion mechanism is a result of material properties of

optical fiber An optical fiber, or optical fibre in Commonwealth English, is a flexible, transparent fiber made by drawing glass (silica) or plastic to a diameter slightly thicker than that of a human hair. Optical fibers are used most often as a means to ...

and applies to both single-mode and multi-mode fibers. Two distinct types of intramodal dispersion are:

chromatic dispersion In optics, and by analogy other branches of physics dealing with wave propagation, dispersion is the phenomenon in which the phase velocity of a wave depends on its frequency; sometimes the term chromatic dispersion is used for specificity to ...

and polarization mode dispersion.

Chromatic dispersion

In silica, the index of refraction is dependent upon wavelength. Therefore different wavelengths will travel down an optical fiber at different velocities. This implies that a pulse with a wider

FWHM In a distribution, full width at half maximum (FWHM) is the difference between the two values of the independent variable at which the dependent variable is equal to half of its maximum value. In other words, it is the width of a spectrum curve mea ...

will spread more than a pulse with a narrower FWHM. This dispersion limits both the bandwidth and the distance over which the information can be transmitted. This is why for long communications links, it is desirable to use a laser with a very narrow linewidth. Distributed Feedback Lasers (DFB) are popular for communications because they have a single longitudinal mode with a very narrow line width.

References

Fiber optics {{optics-stub

Chromatic dispersion

See also

References