Design and characterization of a 10-mode few-mode erbium-doped fiber with multicore pedestal core

A new few-mode fiber design taking advantage of a micro-structured core consisting of 19 secondary cores embedded in a pedestal geometry is presented. This design offers the possibility of precisely tailoring the rare-earth ion distribution in the core in order to manage the differential modal gain. An optimized configuration of an erbium-doped few-mode fiber supporting 10 modes in the C-band with a theoretical low gain excursion is designed and realized. Preliminary optical characterizations of this fiber are presented.