Ultra-selective flexible add and drop multiplexer using rectangular optical filters based on stimulated Brillouin scattering.

We demonstrate an ultra-selective flexible reconfigurable add and drop multiplexer (ROADM) structure enablingseparation and aggregation operations for multi-band orthogonal frequency division multiplexing(MB-OFDM) signal with ~2-GHz spectral granularity and 300-MHz guard band. The ROADM employs rectangular optical filters based on stimulated Brillouin effect (SBS) in fiber, which have steepedges, ~1-dB passband ripple and tunable bandwidth from 100 MHz to 3 GHz realized by two different kinds of electrical feedback pump control approaches. The ROADM performance is measured with MB-OFDM signals inquadrature-phase-shift-keying (QPSK) and 16-quadrature-amplitude-modulation (16-QAM) formats.

Attraction basins as gauges of robustness against boundary conditions in biological complex systems.

One fundamental concept in the context of biological systems on which researches have flourished in the past decade is that of the apparent robustness of these systems, i.e., their ability to resist to perturbations or constraints induced by external or boundary elements such as electromagnetic fields acting on neural networks, micro-RNAs acting on genetic networks and even hormone flows acting both on neural and genetic networks.