Multi-wavelength All-optical 2R Regeneration

We experimentally demonstrate, for the first time to our knowledge, simultaneous all-optical 2R regeneration of multiple WDM channels. In the recent work [1], our group has proposed an all-optical 2R regeneration scheme capable of handling multiple WDM channels simultaneously. Our proposed multi-channel regenerator is a modified configuration of Mamyshev's 2R regenerator [2], in which a conventional highly-nonlinear-fiber (HNLF) is replaced by a novel dispersion-managed nonlinear medium. The proposed multi-channel regeneration scheme uses multiple concatenated dispersion-managed sections, where each dispersion-managed section contains a piece of HNLF and a periodic-group-delay device (PGDD). For the proof-of-principle demonstration of the regenerator we have built a recirculating loop, where, instead of cascading multiple identical HNLF-PGDD sections, we use only one such section and pass the signal through it multiple times. In this dissertation, we present our experimental results on single- and multi-channel all-optical 2R regeneration. We experimentally demonstrate single-channel 2R regeneration in a dispersion-managed configuration of Mamyshev's regenerator. The experimentally observed 3dB eye-opening improvement confirms that single-channel performance is not degraded by dispersion management. The multi-channel regeneration experiments were performed with as many as 12 channels (12 x 10 Gb/s), and as few as 2 channels (2 x 10 Gb/s). We discuss our experimental results on 2-, 8-, and 12-channel all-optical regeneration. All 12 channels demonstrate eye-opening improvement better than 2 dB. We have experimentally characterized the performance of our regenerator with respect to the number of neighboring channels. Our experimental results show that `unlike the prior attempts of multi-channel all-optical regeneration by other groups' our dispersion management technique overcomes the regenerator degradations by inter-channel four-wave mixing (FWM) and cross-phase modulation (CPM).