Dual-pump optical parametric amplifiers for signal processing

Optical parametric amplifiers (OPA) are subject to a great interest due to their multi-functionality in optical signal processing area. In our research we investigate the schemes in which the parametric pump is modulated in order to generate aperiodic time window on the signal and idler waves. This window can be used for pulse compression, sampling, multiplexing and de-multiplexing. We have studied the properties of this time window in single-pump and dual-pump OPA and showed that different pulse shaping regime can be achieved. A potential application is Nyquist pulse shaping for high speed communication. Moreover, thanks to the wavelength-uniform characteristic of this time window for dual-pump OPA, we can address the multi-granularity issue regarding dissimilar-rate WDM networks based on this technique.

During this project, we demonstrated two principal blocks required for routing and transporting data in WDM networks, both based on dual-pump fiber optical parametric amplifier (FOPA) with (sinusoidally) modulated pumps: simultaneous wavelength conversion and time compression, and all-optical 3R regeneration. We also investigate the generation and detection of WDM-Nyquist superchannels.