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The light guidance characteristics of the fully and partially ethanol-filled photonic bandgap fibers (PBFs) are investigated and their applications as modal interferometers (MIs) for temperature sensing are demonstrated. Different from the ethanol-filled solid core photonic crystal fibers (PCFs), the ethanol-filled PBFs are much easier to excite more high order cladding modes, and the effective refractive index difference between the interference modes can reach 26.6 times bigger than that of the ethanol-filled solid core PCF. Without using special splicing techniques, just splicing a short section of the fully or partially ethanol-filled PBF between the single mode fibers, a PBG-based MI can be constructed with a high thermal sensitivity. Moreover, the thermal sensitivity can be adjusted within a large range by selectively filling the air core and/or air claddings of the PBF with ethanol. Experimental results show that the fully ethanol-filled PBF-based MI has the thermal sensitivity up to –292 pm/°C while that of the partially ethanol-filled PBF-based MI is changed to –120 pm/°C. They are 43.8 and 18 times bigger than that of the unfilled PBF-based MI.

We mathematically analyze and experimentally investigate the characteristics of subcarrier-modulated (SCM) light. Our investigation shows that the baseband data are also carried on the optical carrier after subcarrier modulation. This residual data introduce crosstalk when the optical carrier is separated from subcarriers and reused for uplink data modulation. The influence of the residual data carried on the optical carrier is studied in three kinds of upstream transmissions based on wavelength-seeded reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers (RSOAs) for carrier-reuse wavelength-division-multiplexed-passive optical networks (WDM-PONs). Results show that the crosstalk can be significantly suppressed with proper selection of the seeding power and operation conditions of downlink Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM), including driving voltage and bias voltage.

An integrated configuration is proposed to convert tunable slow light from signal to another frequency in a wide bandwidth by using a 70 m-long highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber (HN-PCF). A 10 GHz RZ signal is delayed by a 10 Gbit/s 231-1 pseudo random bit sequence (PRBS) stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) pump, and the slow light is converted to another frequency in a broadband by four-wave mixing (FWM). By this way, not only the slow light is converted, but the idler power is enhanced greatly. In our experiment, all-optical controlled 37.5 ps delay time is converted in a 40 nm bandwidth flatly, and 4.7 dB idler power is enhanced simultaneously. The experimental results are in good agreement with those of the theory.

We propose two novel wavelength-division-multiplexed passive-optical-network (WDM-PON) architectures where subcarriers are employed to transmit downstream data and optical carriers are reused for upstream transmission. Architecture I is designed for the situation where two short distribution fibers are available between the remote node (RN) and each optical network unit (ONU), whereas Architecture II is devised for the case where there is only one distribution fiber between the RN and each ONU. Both architectures use only one interferometric filter located at the RN to simultaneously separate all downlink optical carriers and subcarriers, leading to a considerable cost reduction in the implementation of the WDM-PONs. Separated optical carriers are then reused and injected into reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers as the uplink light sources, which eliminates the necessity of specific wavelength sources at the ONUs. The downstream subcarrier signals are directly detected using baseband receivers. Two multichannel upstream and downstream transmission experiments are carried out at 1.25 Gb/s using the proposed schemes. The impact of optical carrier-to-subcarrier ratio of downlink signal, Rayleigh-backscattering noise, and wavelength mismatch between laser source and filter on system performance is also investigated.

This paper presents the generation and the performance evaluation of optical minimum shift keying (MSK) for high-speed and high-spectral-efficiency wavelength-division multiplexing systems. The detailed principle on optical MSK generation and detection is derived and analyzed. Optical MSK data (10.7 Gb/s) are successfully generated by an experiment using the proposed scheme. The results show that the optical MSK signal exhibits a very compact optical spectrum. The performance of the optical MSK modulated system is evaluated and compared with those of 50% duty-cycle return-to-zero differential phase shift keying (RZ-DPSK) and 50% duty-cycle return-to-zero on-off keying (RZ-OOK) modulated systems, via both simulation and experiment, in terms of dispersion tolerance, linear crosstalk, self-phase modulation (SPM) tolerance, stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) threshold, optimal receiver filter bandwidth, and optimal link launch power into single-mode fibers and dispersion compensation fibers. Experimental and simulation results show that the MSK signal exhibits the largest tolerance against fiber dispersion and SPM effect as compared with RZ-DPSK and RZ-OOK. Experimental results also confirm the negative penalty against the SPM effect. The SBS threshold of both the MSK and RZ-DPSK systems is more than 10 dB higher than that of the RZ-OOK system. The MSK that is generated with conventional carrier-suppressed return-to-zero (CSRZ) pulses exhibits a narrower optimal optical filter bandwidth but a wider electrical filter bandwidth compared with those of RZ-OOK and RZ-DPSK. The MSK signal that is generated with pure dual-mode pulses has a similar optimum range to RZ-OOK and RZ-DPSK at a high optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) but has a narrower optimal optical filter bandwidth at a low OSNR. The optimum fiber launch power study shows that the MSK signal that is generated using the conventional CSRZ pulses exhibits higher optimum launch power, which agrees with the SPM tolerance study.

This paper presents a design approach for multistage gain-flattened fiber Raman amplifiers (FRAs) utilizing the multiwavelength-pumping scheme. To the authors' best knowledge, it is the first time that Raman amplifiers of more than one stage are considered in the design process so as to optimize multistage amplifier performance simultaneously. It is shown both theoretically and experimentally that optical power path integrals among several stages can, in principle, be arbitrarily redistributed while maintaining its gain performance, as long as the consolidated sums at different pump wavelengths are unaltered. The overall gain spectrum of a multistage FRA is thus very close to the cumulative spectrum of chained identical single-stage amplifiers with span numbers equal to its stages. However, the traditional prerequisite to minimize gain flatness in every stage is no longer required. It provides flexibilities to take full advantage of pump lasers with moderate launched powers and allows the reduction of the number of pump lasers and/or wavelengths in most stages. By arranging small positive net gain to the first stages and enhancing it at shorter signal wavelengths, significant reduction and flattening of total noise figure (NF) is achieved even if a pure backward pumping scheme is utilized. Finally, various pumping configurations for Raman amplifiers with hybrid dispersion-compensating fiber (DCF) and standard single-mode fiber (SMF) are discussed, with the objective of realizing flattened gain and noise performance simultaneously without using forward pumps.

In this paper, we propose and demonstrate the practical all-optical wavelength multicasting scheme based on the four-wave mixing (FWM) effect in both a highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) and a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). Then we carry out comprehensive comparisons of the performance differences between using the HNLF and SOA for this proposed multicasting scheme. Seven multicast channels are experimentally demonstrated by using three co-polarized probes and a modulated signal. The merit of the proposed scheme is that the polarization sensitivity is significantly reduced from more than 20 dB to approximately 5 dB using the HNFL and 2.5 dB using the SOA. The low polarization sensitivity leads to a difference of less than 1 dB in the power penalty of the multicast channels at bit error rate . In addition, we compare the multicasting performance of the OOK and differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) signals using the proposed scheme and found that the power penalties of the DPSK multicast channels in the HNLF and the SOA are less than 1.25 and 1.1 dB respectively, and the power penalties of the OOK multicast channels are less than 1.5 dB and 3.1 dB in the HNLF and the SOA, respectively.