Specialty Optical Fibers Handbook

deployment started in the late 1970s—at first with multimode fibers, but from the

beginning of the 1980s onwards with increasing deployment of single-mode fibers

to meet the requirements of high-speed long-haul communications.

With an in-depth understanding of the special properties of single-mode fibers

(e.g., see Chapter 2) and the tools available for manufacturing them, as described

in Chapter 3, the field was open for extending their application beyond the one of

pure light transport. Specialty single-mode fibers have, therefore, been developed

to incorporate several functionalities (i.e., multifunctional fiber), and today, they

find important uses in a diverse range of applications such as optical amplifiers

and lasers, sensors, signal restoration, ...