Design and fabrication of locally dispersion-flattened large effective area fibers

We have designed and fabricated single-mode non-zero dispersion-shifted fibers with locally flattened dispersion slope (/spl les/0.035 ps/nm/sup 2/.km) and large effective area (/spl sim/70 /spl mu/m/sup 2/) in the 1550-nm window, suitable for long-distance high bit-rate dense WDM transmissions.