Demonstration of a fiber optical communication system employing a silica microsphere-based OFC source

The fabrication of microsphere resonators and the generation of optical frequency combs (OFC) have achieved a significant breakthrough in the past decade. Despite these advances, no studies have reported the experimental implementation and demonstration of silica microsphere OFCs for data transmission. In this work, to the best of our knowledge, we experimentally for the first time present a designed silica microsphere whispering-gallery-mode microresonator (WGMR) OFC as a C-band light source where 400 GHz spaced carriers provide data transmission of up to 10 Gbps NRZ-OOK modulated signals over the standard ITU-T G.652 telecom fiber span of 20 km in length. A proof-of-concept experiment is performed with two newly generated carriers (from 7-carrier OFC) having the highest peak power. The experimental realization is also strengthened by the modeling and simulations of the proposed system showing a strong match of the results. The demonstrated setup serves as a platform for the future experimental implementation of silica microsphere WGMR-OFC in more complex WDM transmission system realizations with advanced modulation schemes.