Microwave photonics applications of multicore fibers

This is the first time, to our knowledge, that the application of multicore fibers (MCFs) to the field of microwave photonics (MWP) has been proposed. The implementation of sampled optical delay lines for RF signals by means of heterogeneous MCFs is addressed as a generic building block and discussion is then centered on several selected applications including filtering, optical beamforming, and arbitrary waveform generation.