Multimode Nonlinear Fiber Optics: Massively Parallel Numerical Solver, Tutorial and Outlook

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new massively parallel numerical solver for multimode nonlinear fiber optics, significantly accelerating simulations and enabling advanced analysis of multimode fibers for telecommunications, lasers, and imaging.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel, open-source numerical solution method for the generalized multimode nonlinear Schrödinger equation with GPU acceleration, improving computational efficiency over traditional methods.

Findings

Achieved significant speed-up using GPU parallelization.

Demonstrated solver effectiveness with graded- and step-index fibers.

Provided analysis tools for multimode fiber research.

Abstract

Building on the scientific understanding and technological infrastructure of single-mode fibers, multimode fibers are being explored as a means of adding new degrees of freedom to optical technologies such as telecommunications, fiber lasers, imaging, and measurement. Here, starting from a baseline of single-mode nonlinear fiber optics, we introduce the growing topic of multimode nonlinear fiber optics. We demonstrate a new numerical solution method for the system of equations that describes nonlinear multimode propagation, the generalized multimode nonlinear Schrodinger equation. This numerical solver is freely available, and includes a number of multimode fiber analysis tools. It features a significant parallel computing speed-up on modern graphical processing units, translating to orders-of-magnitude speed-up over the split-step Fourier method. We demonstrate its use with several examples in graded- and step-index multimode fibers. Finally, we discuss several key open directions and questions, whose answers could have significant scientific and technological impact.