Super-Nyquist-WDM transmission over 7,326-km seven-core fiber with capacity-distance product of 1.03 Exabit/s·km

We show super-Nyquist-WDM transmission technique, where optical signals with duobinary-pulse shaping can be wavelength-multiplexed with frequency spacing of below baudrate. Duobinary-pulse shaping can reduce the signal bandwidth to be a half of baudrate while controlling inter-symbol interference can be compensated by the maximum likelihood sequence estimation in a receiver. First, we experimentally evaluate crosstalk characteristics as a function of channel spacing between the dual-channel DP-QPSK signals with duobinary-pulse shaping. As a result, the crosstalk penalty can be almost negligible as far as the ratio of baudrate to frequency spacing is maintained to be less than 1.20. Next, we demonstrate 140.7-Tbit/s, 7,326-km transmission of 7 × 201-channel 25-GHz-spaced super-Nyquist-WDM 100-Gbit/s optical signals using seven-core fiber and full C-band seven-core EDFAs. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first reports of high-capacity transmission experiments with capacity-distance product in excess of 1 Exabit/s·km.