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Characterization and Applications of Vector Phase-Sensitive Amplifiers

Abel Lorences-Riesgo

Published Jan 1, 2015• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

This work is devoted to the characterization of vector phase-sensitive amplifiers and processors. A detailed analysis of degenerate vector phase-sensitive amplifier (PSA) is performed.The gain and phase-sensitive extinction ratio are theoretically analyzed using three-wave theory. Experiments and simulation results confirm the validity of this three-wave theory. The influence of polarization-mode dispersion is also evaluated, showing that aligning the pump polarizations at the fiber input is essential in order to achieve the theoretically predicted results. The scheme is also compared to the degenerate scalar PSA scheme. At the same pump power, the vector PSA has lower gain but also less influence from higher-order idlers and lower pump depletion due to FWM between the pumps. Using the degenerate vector PSA, phase-sensitive (PS) amplification of dual-polarization (DP) binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) signals was demonstrated. To the best of our knowledge, this was the first demonstration of a DP-modulated signal with large net phase-sensitive gain. Furthermore, we also demonstrated that this scheme can phase regenerate the signal. The same scheme was also used for a different purpose: quadrature decomposition into two cross-polarized waves. We demonstrated demultiplexing of quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) signal into two cross-polarized BPSK signals by the operating the amplifier in phase-insensitive mode. The design of a novel phase-locked loop scheme enabled stable operation and negligible penalty in the decomposition.

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Experimental analysis of degenerate vector phase-sensitive amplification

Abel Lorences-Riesgo, Fabrizio Chiarello, Carl Lundström +2 more

We comprehensively investigate a degenerate vector phase-sensitive amplifier (PSA). We determine the gain dependence on the relative phase and polarization angle between the pumps and the degenerate signal wave. The vector PSA is experimentally shown to be sensitive to the pump states of polarization (SOP) due to polarization mode dispersion in the fiber. However, the scheme performance agrees well with theory under specific pump SOPs and we achieve an on-off gain over 10 dB with a small deviation from the theoretically expected results. In comparison to the scalar scheme, the proposed vector scheme has larger tolerance for pump depletion due to four-wave mixing between pumps and generation of higher-order idlers.

Optics Express•Sep 2, 2014•19 citations

Polarization-Assisted Phase-Sensitive Processor

Francesca R. Parmigiani, Graham Hesketh, Radan Slavı́k +3 more

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a phase-sensitive optical processor, capable of generating two codirectional and π-phase-shifted phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSAs) in a single device. Phase-sensitive operation is obtained by polarization mixing a phase-locked signal/idler pair generated in a degenerate dual-pump vector parametric amplifier based on four-wave mixing in a highly nonlinear fiber. We refer to this configuration as a polarization assisted PSA and demonstrate some of the applications that it may find. First, we experimentally demonstrate the regeneration of a binary phase shift keying signal in a system that requires only a very low nonlinear phase shift of 0.35 rad. Second, we decompose a quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) signal into its in-phase and quadrature components. While application to a QPSK signal is shown in our demonstration, we demonstrate numerically that any complex modulation format signal can be decomposed using this approach. Finally, we use our processor to regenerate QPSK signals in a single nonlinear device.

Journal of Lightwave Technology•Jan 6, 2015•40 citations

Demonstration of Degenerate Vector Phase-Sensitive Amplification

Abel Lorences-Riesgo, Magnus Karlsson, C. Lundstrm +1 more

The performance of a degenerate vector (dual cross-polarized pump) phase-sensitive amplifier (PSA) is characterized and compared to a degenerate scalar (dual co-polarized pump) PSA. In both schemes, we assess the gain as a function of the signal state of polarization, verifying its compliance with theory, and the phase transfer function.

European Conference on Optical Communication•Jan 1, 2013•7 citations

Polarization-Independent Phase-Sensitive Amplification

Abel Lorences-Riesgo, Peter A. Andrekson, Magnus Karlsson

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.

Journal of Lightwave Technology•Apr 4, 2016•15 citations

Phase sensitive parametric amplifiers and their applications

Joseph Kakande

Phase sensitive amplification (PSA) is a remarkably powerful tool if implemented correctly - it allows amplification with a noise figure lower than quantum mechanics normally dictates, and also allows the development of systems that coherently process the phase of their optical inputs. PSA at infrared wavelengths can be achieved using second or third order optical nonlinearities - indeed the first demonstrations of PSA utilised degenerate three photon mixing in bulk crystals, allowing the observation of effects such as quantum quadrature squeezing. This PhD research project was aimed at translating the fascinating science of PSAs into applications, based on Kerr nonlinearity in optical fibres, capable of being deployed in modern core optical networks runnning at 40 Gbit/s and higher. This objective was an integral part of the European Union FP7 project PHASORS. Studies, both theoretical and experimental, were carried out on wideband non-degenerate PSAs. The inline cascaded fiber optic parametric amplifier (FOPA), in which a first phase insensitive FOPA is used to generate phase locked signal-idler pairs, followed by a second FOPA in which PSA takes place, was used to experimentally demonstrate PSA gain characteristics in linear and saturated modes of operation, with PSA obtained over 20 nm in the telecom C-band. Focus was then re-directed towards applying a dual pump PSA to DPSK regeneration. The amplitude and phase limiting characteristics of these devices were experimentally studied, in particular revealing that amplitude saturation arises due to an interplay between input phase and nonlinear phase matching along the nonlinear fibre. This feature was used to identify a regime of operation for DPSK regeneration combining simultaneous phase and amplitude regeneration. A practical DPSK regenerator based on a degenerate dual pump phase sensitive FOPA was built. The device advanced the state of the art by incorporating a pump synthesis stage that allowed black-box operation. Detailed measurements using noise sources with varying frequency distributions in both amplitude and in phase, are presented, and the ability of the system to improve the phase and amplitude characteristics of signals at its input was verified. Also presented are results showing the regenerator installed in the middle of an 800 km dark fiber link. Finally, a novel scheme was proposed and demonstrated that utilised parametric mixing to perform arbitrary phase quantization. This relied on the coherent addition of an M-level PSK signal with a conjugated (M-1)th phase harmonic, scaled by a coefficient m, to achieve M-level phase quantization. The concept was successfully demonstrated with QPSK data signals at 56 Gbaud, as well as used to quantize lower bandwidth test signals from 2 to 6 phase levels.

•Mar 1, 2012•3 citations

Phase and Amplitude Regeneration of Differential Phase-Shift Keyed Signals Using Phase-Sensitive Amplification

Kevin Croussore, Guifang Li

Phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSAs) offer numerous advantages over phase-insensitive amplifiers in optical communications. Squeezing of optical phase through PSA can remove accumulated phase jitter, which is a critical functionality for an all- optical, phase-shift keyed network. In recent experiments, reviewed in this report, different implementations of PSA were used for phase regeneration of both return-to-zero differential phase-shift keying and nonreturn-to-zero differential phase-shift keying data. The first demonstration explored the properties and performance of PSA that occurs in nonlinear interferometers. Experiments confirmed that a PSA operating in the depleted pump regime provides simultaneous reduction of amplitude and phase noise (PN). Phase regeneration performance limit was reached as a consequence of pump-wave imperfections, which can be significantly reduced through proper design. PSA that occurs directly in fiber in a traveling-wave configuration through partially degenerate four-wave mixing was also studied. The latter implementation offers stronger phase-matched gain and suppression of amplitude-to-phase noise conversion. Technical issues that remain to be addressed are identified for each implementation. Results characterized using coherent detection offer direct measurements of the phase-regenerative behavior.

IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Quantum Electronics•Jan 1, 2008•103 citations
This work is devoted to the characterization of vector phase-sensitive amplifiers and processors. A detailed analysis of degenerate vector phase-sensitive amplifier (PSA) is performed.The gain and phase-sensitive extinction ratio are theoretically analyzed using three-wave theory. Experiments and simulation results confirm the validity of this three-wave theory. The influence of polarization-mode dispersion is also evaluated, showing that aligning the pump polarizations at the fiber input is essential in order to achieve the theoretically predicted results. The scheme is also compared to the degenerate scalar PSA scheme. At the same pump power, the vector PSA has lower gain but also less influence from higher-order idlers and lower pump depletion due to FWM between the pumps. Using the degenerate vector PSA, phase-sensitive (PS) amplification of dual-polarization (DP) binary phase-shift keying (BPSK) signals was demonstrated. To the best of our knowledge, this was the first demonstration of a DP-modulated signal with large net phase-sensitive gain. Furthermore, we also demonstrated that this scheme can phase regenerate the signal. The same scheme was also used for a different purpose: quadrature decomposition into two cross-polarized waves. We demonstrated demultiplexing of quadrature phase-shift keying (QPSK) signal into two cross-polarized BPSK signals by the operating the amplifier in phase-insensitive mode. The design of a novel phase-locked loop scheme enabled stable operation and negligible penalty in the decomposition.
We comprehensively investigate a degenerate vector phase-sensitive amplifier (PSA). We determine the gain dependence on the relative phase and polarization angle between the pumps and the degenerate signal wave. The vector PSA is experimentally shown to be sensitive to the pump states of polarization (SOP) due to polarization mode dispersion in the fiber. However, the scheme performance agrees well with theory under specific pump SOPs and we achieve an on-off gain over 10 dB with a small deviation from the theoretically expected results. In comparison to the scalar scheme, the proposed vector scheme has larger tolerance for pump depletion due to four-wave mixing between pumps and generation of higher-order idlers.
We propose and experimentally demonstrate a phase-sensitive optical processor, capable of generating two codirectional and π-phase-shifted phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSAs) in a single device. Phase-sensitive operation is obtained by polarization mixing a phase-locked signal/idler pair generated in a degenerate dual-pump vector parametric amplifier based on four-wave mixing in a highly nonlinear fiber. We refer to this configuration as a polarization assisted PSA and demonstrate some of the applications that it may find. First, we experimentally demonstrate the regeneration of a binary phase shift keying signal in a system that requires only a very low nonlinear phase shift of 0.35 rad. Second, we decompose a quadrature phase shift keying (QPSK) signal into its in-phase and quadrature components. While application to a QPSK signal is shown in our demonstration, we demonstrate numerically that any complex modulation format signal can be decomposed using this approach. Finally, we use our processor to regenerate QPSK signals in a single nonlinear device.
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.
Phase sensitive amplification (PSA) is a remarkably powerful tool if implemented correctly - it allows amplification with a noise figure lower than quantum mechanics normally dictates, and also allows the development of systems that coherently process the phase of their optical inputs. PSA at infrared wavelengths can be achieved using second or third order optical nonlinearities - indeed the first demonstrations of PSA utilised degenerate three photon mixing in bulk crystals, allowing the observation of effects such as quantum quadrature squeezing. This PhD research project was aimed at translating the fascinating science of PSAs into applications, based on Kerr nonlinearity in optical fibres, capable of being deployed in modern core optical networks runnning at 40 Gbit/s and higher. This objective was an integral part of the European Union FP7 project PHASORS. Studies, both theoretical and experimental, were carried out on wideband non-degenerate PSAs. The inline cascaded fiber optic parametric amplifier (FOPA), in which a first phase insensitive FOPA is used to generate phase locked signal-idler pairs, followed by a second FOPA in which PSA takes place, was used to experimentally demonstrate PSA gain characteristics in linear and saturated modes of operation, with PSA obtained over 20 nm in the telecom C-band. Focus was then re-directed towards applying a dual pump PSA to DPSK regeneration. The amplitude and phase limiting characteristics of these devices were experimentally studied, in particular revealing that amplitude saturation arises due to an interplay between input phase and nonlinear phase matching along the nonlinear fibre. This feature was used to identify a regime of operation for DPSK regeneration combining simultaneous phase and amplitude regeneration. A practical DPSK regenerator based on a degenerate dual pump phase sensitive FOPA was built. The device advanced the state of the art by incorporating a pump synthesis stage that allowed black-box operation. Detailed measurements using noise sources with varying frequency distributions in both amplitude and in phase, are presented, and the ability of the system to improve the phase and amplitude characteristics of signals at its input was verified. Also presented are results showing the regenerator installed in the middle of an 800 km dark fiber link. Finally, a novel scheme was proposed and demonstrated that utilised parametric mixing to perform arbitrary phase quantization. This relied on the coherent addition of an M-level PSK signal with a conjugated (M-1)th phase harmonic, scaled by a coefficient m, to achieve M-level phase quantization. The concept was successfully demonstrated with QPSK data signals at 56 Gbaud, as well as used to quantize lower bandwidth test signals from 2 to 6 phase levels.
Phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSAs) offer numerous advantages over phase-insensitive amplifiers in optical communications. Squeezing of optical phase through PSA can remove accumulated phase jitter, which is a critical functionality for an all- optical, phase-shift keyed network. In recent experiments, reviewed in this report, different implementations of PSA were used for phase regeneration of both return-to-zero differential phase-shift keying and nonreturn-to-zero differential phase-shift keying data. The first demonstration explored the properties and performance of PSA that occurs in nonlinear interferometers. Experiments confirmed that a PSA operating in the depleted pump regime provides simultaneous reduction of amplitude and phase noise (PN). Phase regeneration performance limit was reached as a consequence of pump-wave imperfections, which can be significantly reduced through proper design. PSA that occurs directly in fiber in a traveling-wave configuration through partially degenerate four-wave mixing was also studied. The latter implementation offers stronger phase-matched gain and suppression of amplitude-to-phase noise conversion. Technical issues that remain to be addressed are identified for each implementation. Results characterized using coherent detection offer direct measurements of the phase-regenerative behavior.