Microresonator frequency combs harness the nonlinear Kerr effect in an integrated optical cavity to generate a multitude of phase-locked frequency lines. The line spacing can reach values in the ...order of 100 GHz, making it an attractive multi-wavelength light source for applications in fiber-optic communications. Depending on the dispersion of the microresonator, different physical dynamics have been observed. A recently discovered comb state corresponds to the formation of mode-locked dark pulses in a normal-dispersion microcavity. Such dark-pulse combs are particularly compelling for advanced coherent communications since they display unusually high power-conversion efficiency. Here, we report the first coherent-transmission experiments using 64-quadrature amplitude modulation encoded onto the frequency lines of a dark-pulse comb. The high conversion efficiency of the comb enables transmitted optical signal-to-noise ratios above 33 dB, while maintaining a laser pump power level compatible with state-of-the-art hybrid silicon lasers.
We present a low-complexity fully pilot-based digital signal processing (DSP) chain designed for high spectral efficiency optical transmission systems. We study the performance of the individual ...pilot algorithms in simulations before demonstrating transmission of a 51×24 Gbaud PM-64QAM superchannel over distances reaching 1000 km. We present an overhead optimization technique using the system achievable information rate to find the optimal balance between increased performance and throughput reduction from adding additional DSP pilots. Using the optimal overhead of 2.4%, we report 9.3 (8.3) bits/s/Hz spectral efficiency, or equivalently 11.9 (10.6) Tb/s superchannel throughput, after 480 (960) km of transmission over 80 km spans with EDFA-only amplification. Moreover, we show that the optimum overhead depends only weakly on transmission distance, concluding that back-to-back optimization is sufficient for all studied distances. Our results show that pilot-based DSP combined with overhead optimization can increase the robustness and performance of systems using advanced modulation formats while still maintaining state-of-the-art spectral efficiency and multi-Tb/s throughput.
We exploit the coherence of frequency combs for high spectral efficiency superchannel transmission via effective sharing of a single pilot tone. By phase-locking the receiver comb to the transmitted ...pilot tone, carrier offsets are suppressed while both the overhead and complexity associated with the pilot tone are reduced. We form a 55 carrier superchannel using a 25-GHz spaced electro-optic frequency comb seeded by a 100-kHz linewidth laser. At a pilot tone overhead of <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX"><</tex-math></inline-formula>2%, the reduction in carrier offsets is shown to facilitate blind DSP-based carrier recovery of all 54 <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">\times</tex-math></inline-formula> 24 Gbaud PM-128QAM data channels. The resulting superchannel spectral efficiency is 10.3 bits/s/Hz assuming a 28% overhead for forward error correction. Our results show the potential for optical pilot tones to reduce both overhead and complexity in systems using comb-based superchannels together with high-order modulation formats.
We demonstrate transmission of a comb-based 10 Tb/s 50 × 20 Gbaud PM-64QAM superchannel using frequency comb regeneration to reduce carrier offsets and allow for self-homodyne detection. The ...regeneration is enabled by transmitting two optical pilot tones which are filtered and recovered in the receiver using optical injection locking and an electrical phase-locked loop. We show that by utilizing frequency combs together with optical pilot tones, self-homodyne detection similar to systems using one pilot tone per wavelength channel, can be achieved. Sharing the overhead for pilot tones reduces the complexity and limits the overhead to 4%. This enabled a total superchannel spectral efficiency of 7.7 b/s/Hz. To evaluate the performance, we perform both back-to-back measurements and transmission over 80 km of standard single-mode fiber. Successful self-homodyne detection of all 50 data channels in the 10-nm-wide superchannel demonstrates that the spectral coherence from frequency combs, combined with the use of optical pilots, can overcome limitations arising from frequency offset and phase noise in high-order QAM transmission while keeping the pilot overhead low.
We present a thorough description of the dominating intramodal and intermodal four-wave mixing interactions occurring in a highly nonlinear few-mode fiber and describe their phase matching ...conditions. Those interactions that result in few-mode parametric amplification using a single-frequency pump are of particular interest. Thus, based on the phase matching conditions of such interactions, we outline the dispersion properties that a fiber should possess in order to achieve few-mode parametric amplification, while having minimal modal crosstalk. Accordingly, we design and optimize two fibers such that they meet the dispersion requirements for parametric amplification of two and four spatial modes, respectively. The two-mode fiber provides a maximum differential modal gain (DMG) of 0.21 dB across the C-band with a minimum gain of 9.5 dB per mode, while the four-mode fiber provides a maximum DMG of 1.51 dB with a minimum gain of 6.5 dB per mode over a 19 nm bandwidth in the C-band. The designed fibers are highly nonlinear dispersion-shifted few-mode fibers that provide both high nonlinearity and low dispersion for several modes in the C-band, which have not been demonstrated simultaneously to date. We also take practical fabrication issues into account and analyze and compare the tolerances of the structural parameters of both fibers to small deviations from their optimal values.
We thoroughly analyze the requirements on the signal and idler state of polarizations (SOPs) for achieving maximum amplification in phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSAs). These requirements are described ...using a Jones-space description as well as a Stokes-space description. Our analysis includes the cases of polarization-diverse and vector PSAs, and in each type of PSA, we also consider the signal-degenerate and the non-degenerate schemes. We observe that the relation between the signal and idler SOPs to achieve maximum phase-sensitive (PS) amplification can be described similarly in polarization-diverse and in vector PSAs. Moreover, both types of PSAs are polarization-dependent, which means that PSAs do require polarization-tracking schemes when being implemented in a realistic optical-transmission scenario. We therefore evaluate how polarization tracking of the signal and the idler SOPs can overcome the theoretical polarization dependence of both polarization-diverse and vector PSAs. We find that only one polarization tracker for either the signal or idler SOP is necessary for achieving polarization-independent PS amplification when considering the general case of dual-polarization (DP) modulated signals. This polarization tracker requires the control of three degrees of freedom which describe a general polarization rotation. For single-polarization (SP) modulated signals, the polarization tracker can rotate both the signal and the idler SOPs simultaneously which eliminates the need for splitting the signal and the idler before the PSA. Moreover, only two degrees of freedom for the polarization tracker are necessary in this case. When considering degenerate schemes, a polarization tracker with two degrees of freedom is sufficient to achieve maximum PS amplification of DP binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) signals in both vector and polarization diverse PSAs. For the case of SP-BPSK signals, a polarization-diverse PSA can perform polarization-independent amplification by controlling the relative phase between the pumps, whereas a polarization tracker with only one degree of freedom is necessary in the case of vector PSAs.
We review the use of optical frequency combs in wavelength-division multiplexed (WDM) fiber optic communication systems. In particular, we focus on the unique possibilities that are opened up by the ...stability of the comb-line spacing and the phase coherence between the lines. We give an overview of different techniques for the generation of optical frequency combs and review their use in WDM systems. We discuss the benefits of the stable line spacing of frequency combs for creating densely-packed optical superchannels with high spectral efficiency. Additionally, we discuss practical considerations when implementing frequency-comb-based transmitters. Furthermore, we describe several techniques for comb-based superchannel receivers that enables the phase coherence between the lines to be used to simplify or increase the performance of the digital carrier recovery. The first set of receiver techniques is based on comb-regeneration from optical pilot tones, enabling low-overhead self-homodyne detection. The second set of techniques takes advantage of the phase coherence by sharing phase information between the channels through joint digital signal processing (DSP) schemes. This enables a lower DSP complexity or a higher phase-noise tolerance.
We demonstrate and characterize an all-optical self-homodyne (SH) frequency superchannel enabled by comb regeneration at the receiver. In order to generate the superchannel, we use a frequency comb ...with 26 carriers spaced by 25 GHz at the transmitter, from which 24 carriers are modulated with polarization-multiplexed 32 quadrature amplitude modulation (PM 32-QAM) data. To enable comb regeneration at the receiver side, the two central carriers remain unmodulated. High fidelity comb regeneration is achieved by filtering the two unmodulated carriers with an approximately 25 MHz wide optical filter based on Brillouin amplification before a parametric mixer. The carriers from the regenerated comb are then used as local oscillator for SH detection. We demonstrate that all 24 carriers can be detected with an optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) penalty lower than 2.5 dB in a back-to-back scenario. We also demonstrate that the whole superchannel can be transmitted through 120 km of single-mode fiber (SMF) and be detected with bit-error rate (BER) below 0.015.
We propose and demonstrate frequency-comb regeneration using injection locking and a parametric mixer. We theoretically evaluate the effect of the dispersive walk-off between the two unmodulated ...carriers from which the comb is regenerated. We calculate the maximum number of carriers which can be regenerated as a function of the laser linewidth and transmission distance when considering dispersion-unmanaged links. Experimentally, we demonstrate a 70 line comb generation without major linewidth degradation from two carriers with 15 dB optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR). The low OSNR operation is achieved by the use of optical injection locking. We also evaluate the degradation in the comb regeneration when the carriers are temporally decorrelated in order to emulate the effect of dispersive walk-off. When the temporal delay is 1.5 ns, the comb regeneration does not suffer from major degradation but when the delay is 10 ns, only 30 carriers can be regenerated without linewidth degradation, which agrees with our theoretical analysis.
We investigate the performance of single-pilot-tone locked frequency comb-based superchannel transmission for distances up to 1200km. In our scheme, electro-optic transmitter and receiver combs are ...locked by leaving one of the transmitter carriers unmodulated and regenerating the receiver comb via optical injection locking. This approach significantly reduces carrier offsets and therefore leads to reduced digital signal processing complexity. We experimentally assess how transmission impairments such as noise added by optical amplifiers and fiber nonlinearities affect the quality of the comb regeneration. Our results show that while the operating conditions are more stringent at longer distances, the single pilot is robust to impairments. At optimal launch power, similar performance with respect to an intradyne receiver is observed, showing that the optical pilot tones can be co-transmitted with data channels even at distances spanning hundreds of kilometer. The total superchannel spectral efficiency (throughput), including the pilot tone and guardbands, is 9.6 bits/s/Hz (12 Tbit/s) after 480 km and 8.4 bits/s/Hz (10.5 Tbit/s) after 960km.
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