Optical fibers are used in a variety of telecommunications applications, including high-capacity data transmission for networks, data centers and server clusters. Conventional high-capacity optical-fiber links typically include cables (e.g., ribbon cables) that include conventional single-core multimode optical fibers, with each fiber carrying a single data channel. Unfortunately, such cables are limited in their connection density and tend to be bulky.
Multicore optical fibers (“multicore fibers”) have been developed in part to provide higher data capacity. A multicore fiber has multiple cores embedded in a single cladding, and these cores tend to be single-mode cores with diameters less than 10 microns. Multicore fibers thus promise higher density connections as well as greater data capacity than do conventional fibers. However, multicore fibers tend to be difficult to use in high-capacity data transmission applications since the cores are fixed in place and each core needs to be aligned with high accuracy to a corresponding optical transmitter or optical receiver.