Optical UWB doublet pulse generation using multiple nonlinearities of single SOA.

All-optical ultra-wideband (UWB) doublet pulse generation based on the multiple nonlinear effects of a single semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) is demonstrated. First, a monocycle pulse is obtained by means of cross-gain modulation and self gain-saturation in the SOA, and a Gaussian pulse at conjugated light is obtained using four-wave mixing of the SOA. Secondly, the Gaussian pulse at the conjugated light is combined with the monocycle pulse by proper time delay to form a doublet pulse. The central frequency and 10 dB bandwidth of the doublet radio frequency are 5 and 6.25 GHz, respectively. The scheme is simple since only a single SOA is required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]