Infinite 3D printed microstructured low-loss and near-zero dispersion polypropylene fiber for THz communications

In this work, a low-loss near-zero dispersion polypropylene fiber is designed for signal transmission at the carrier frequency of 128 GHz. An infinite 3D printing technique is explored to continuously fabricate the proposed fiber without length-limit. The in-depth theoretical and experimental comparisons between the two fibers printed using standard and infinite 3D printers are introduced in detail. Particularly, transmission losses of 2.39 dB/m and 5.57 dB/m have been experimentally demonstrated for the two fibers at 128 GHz. Furthermore, for the two fibers with the corresponding lengths of 2 m and 1.6 m, signal transmission with bit error rates far below the forward error correction limit (10-3) was clearly observed. Error-free transmission is realized at the bit rates up to 5.2 Gbps for the standard 3D printed fiber at the length of 1.5 m.