Nonlinearity-Free Coherent Transmission in Hollow-Core Antiresonant Fiber

We demonstrate the first multiterabit/s wavelength division multiplexing data transmission through hollow-core antiresonant fiber (HC-ARF). In total, 16 channels of 32-GBd dual-polarization Nyquist-shaped 256QAM signal channels were transmitted through a 270-m-long fiber without observing any power penalty. In a single-channel high power transmission experiment, no nonlinearity penalty was observed for up to 1 W of received power, despite the very low chromatic dispersion of the fiber (<2 ps/nm/km). Our simulations show that such a low level of nonlinearity should enable transmission at 6.4 Tb/s over 1200 km of HC-ARF, even when the fiber attenuation is significantly greater than that of SMF-28. As signals propagate through hollow-core fibers at close to the speed of light in vacuum such a link would be of interest in latency-sensitive data transmission applications.