Experimental demonstration of slicing supercontinuum-based 4.39-bit all-optical quantization.

We demonstrate an all-optical quantization scheme by slicing the supercontinuum (SC) generated in the normal dispersion region of a highly nonlinear fiber. The -20 dB bandwidth of the SC is broadened from 12.9 to 49.7 nm when input average power varies from 0.062 to 0.692 mW, which is used for realizing subsequent quantization. In addition, in order to evaluate the system performance, we have calculated the values of differential nonlinear error, integral nonlinear error, and effective number of bit from the experimental results as 0.471 least significant bit (LSB), 0.519 LSB, and 4.39 bit, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]