Workshop: Hollow-Core Fibers at Scale: Can We Co-Design Performance, Energy, and Operability?

Hollow-core fibers (HCFs) promise ultra-low latency and negligible nonlinear penalties, potentially reshaping the design space of optical transmission. This workshop focuses on the system-level trade-offs enabled by HCFs and the end-to-end redesign choices they may trigger across fiber/cable, line systems, coherent optics, amplification, and network architecture.

A central question is how reduced nonlinearity should be translated into meaningful gains: should systems exploit higher launch powers to maximize capacity, or instead prioritize lower power to improve energy efficiency— especially as span lengths increase? What operating points, amplification strategies, optical bandwidth choices, and transmission architectures become most advantageous, also considering deployment-level constraints?

We will contrast these questions across short-reach/DCI, terrestrial metro/long-haul, and ultra-long submarine links, where constraints on reach, amplification, and reliability differ.

The workshop will debate which assumptions of today’s SMF-optimized systems remain valid, what must be redesigned end-to-end, and how to evaluate the resulting performance–energy trade-offs at the network and system levels.