Editors' Picks Collection: Optical Communication

To honor its 40th Anniversary, the editors of Optics Letters selected articles from a variety of topic areas that reflect the progression of each area over the journal's history. Below is a collection of articles in the area of Optical Communication.

Note that this selection of articles is not meant to be exhaustive but authoritative, showing that significant contributions were made and continue to be made in this area.


  1. Discovery of the soliton self-frequency shift

    F. M. Mitschke and L. F. Mollenauer

    Opt. Letters 11(10) 659-661 (1986)

  2. Antiresonant reflecting photonic crystal optical waveguides

    N. M. Litchinitser, A. K. Abeeluck, C. Headley, and B. J. Eggleton

    Opt. Letters 27(18) 1592-1594 (2002)

  3. Coupled-resonator optical waveguide: a proposal and analysis

    Amnon Yariv, Yong Xu, Reginald K. Lee, and Axel Scherer

    Opt. Letters 24(11) 711-713 (1999)

  4. Time-domain mid-infrared frequency-comb spectrometer

    Fritz Keilmann, Christoph Gohle, and Ronald Holzwarth

    Opt. Letters 29(13) 1542-1544 (2004)

  5. Negative index of refraction in optical metamaterials

    Vladimir M. Shalaev, Wenshan Cai, Uday K. Chettiar, Hsiao-Kuan Yuan, Andrey K. Sarychev, Vladimir P. Drachev, and Alexander V. Kildishev

    Opt. Letters 30(24) 3356-3358 (2005)

  6. Ultrafast optical switching of terahertz metamaterials fabricated on ErAs/GaAs nanoisland superlattices

    Hou-Tong Chen, Willie J. Padilla, Joshua M.O. Zide, Seth R. Bank, Arthur C. Gossard, Antoinette J. Taylor, and Richard D. Averitt

    Opt. Letters 32(12) 1620-1622 (2007)

  7. Tooth-shaped plasmonic waveguide filters with nanometeric sizes

    Xian-Shi Lin and Xu-Guang Huang

    Opt. Letters 33(23) 2874-2876 (2008)

  8. Ultrasensitive photonic crystal fiber refractive index sensor

    Darran K.C. Wu, Boris T. Kuhlmey, and Benjamin J. Eggleton

    Opt. Letters 34(3) 322-324 (2009)

  9. Generation and propagation of radially polarized beams in optical fibers

    Siddharth Ramachandran, Poul Kristensen, and Man F. Yan

    Opt. Letters 34(16) 2525-2527 (2009)

  10. Low loss broadband transmission in hypocycloid-core Kagome hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

    Y. Y. Wang, N. V. Wheeler, F. Couny, P. J. Roberts, and F. Benabid

    Opt. Letters 36(5) 669-671 (2011)

  11. Octave-spanning frequency comb generation in a silicon nitride chip

    Yoshitomo Okawachi, Kasturi Saha, Jacob S. Levy, Y. Henry Wen, Michal Lipson, and Alexander L. Gaeta

    Opt. Letters 36(17) 3398-3400 (2011)

  12. Stability of solitons in parity-time-symmetric couplers

    Rodislav Driben and Boris A. Malomed

    Opt. Letters 36(22) 4323-4325 (2011)

  13. 2 GHz clock quantum key distribution over 260 km of standard telecom fiber

    Shuang Wang, Wei Chen, Jun-Fu Guo, Zhen-Qiang Yin, Hong-Wei Li, Zheng Zhou, Guang-Can Guo, and Zheng-Fu Han

    Opt. Letters 37(6) 1008-1010 (2012)

  14. Control of orbital angular momentum of light with optical fibers

    Nenad Bozinovic, Steven Golowich, Poul Kristensen, and Siddharth Ramachandran

    Opt. Letters 37(13) 2451-2453 (2012)

  15. Fiber-wireless transmission system of 108 Gb/s data over 80 km fiber and 2×2 multiple-input multiple-output wireless links at 100 GHz W-band frequency

    Xinying Li, Ze Dong, Jianjun Yu, Nan Chi, Yufeng Shao, and G. K. Chang

    Opt. Letters 37(24) 5106-5108 (2012)

  16. Modeling of octave-spanning Kerr frequency combs using a generalized mean-field Lugiato-Lefever model

    Stéphane Coen, Hamish G. Randle, Thibaut Sylvestre, and Miro Erkintalo

    Opt. Letters 38(1) 37-39 (2013)

  17. 100 Tbit/s free-space data link enabled by three-dimensional multiplexing of orbital angular momentum, polarization, and wavelength

    Hao Huang, Guodong Xie, Yan Yan, Nisar Ahmed, Yongxiong Ren, Yang Yue, Dvora Rogawski, Moshe J. Willner, Baris I. Erkmen, Kevin M. Birnbaum, Samuel J. Dolinar, Martin P. J. Lavery, Miles J. Padgett, Moshe Tur, and Alan E. Willner

    Opt. Letters 39(2) 197-200 (2014)

  18. 4×20 Gbit/s mode division multiplexing over free space using vector modes and a q-plate mode (de)multiplexer

    Giovanni Milione, Martin P. J. Lavery, Hao Huang, Yongxiong Ren, Guodong Xie, Thien An Nguyen, Ebrahim Karimi, Lorenzo Marrucci, Daniel A. Nolan, Robert R. Alfano, and Alan E. Willner

    Opt. Letters 40(9) 1980-1983 (2015)