Measurement of Multimode Fiber Bandwidth by the Fourth-Order Spectra of Amplified Spontaneous Emission

We present a novel bandwidth measurement scheme for multimode optical fibers. Amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) radiation was utilized for a source of intrinsically modulated light with a wide modulation bandwidth. In our measurement scheme, the continuous-wave (CW) ASE light that passed through a multimode fiber (MMF) under test was analyzed by the fourth-order power with a high-speed photodetector and an electric spectrum analyzer. The modulation transfer function of the multimode fiber could be directly measured with the photoelectric spectra in the modulation frequency domain. The measurement result of our method was experimentally compared to that of the conventional measurement scheme based on the impulse response measurement. It has been found that our scheme provides a stable measurement means of MMF characterization that is suitable for the field testing due to the simplicity of the system.