Dynamic characterization and amplification of sub-picosecond pulses in fiber optical parametric chirped pulse amplifiers.

We show a first-time demonstration of amplification of 400 fs pulses in a fiber optical parametric amplifier. The 400 fs signal is stretched in time, amplified by 26 dB and compressed back to 500 fs. A significant broadening of the pulses is experimentally shown due to dispersion and limited gain bandwidth both in saturated and unsaturated gain regimes.

Parametric amplification and phase preserving amplitude regeneration of a 640 Gbit/s RZ-DPSK signal.

We report the first experimental demonstration of parametric amplification and all-optical phase-preserving amplitude regeneration for a 640 Gbit/s return-to-zero (RZ) differential phase-shift keying (DPSK) optical time division multiplexed (OTDM) signal. In the designed gain-flattened single-pump fiber optical parametric amplifier (FOPA), 620 fs short optical pulses are successfully amplified with 15 dB gain with error-free performance and less than 1 dB power penalty. Phase-preserving amplitude regeneration based on gain saturation in the FOPA is carried out for optical signals with degraded optical signal-to-noise ratio.

Asymmetric gain-saturated spectrum in fiber optical parametric amplifiers.

We demonstrate experimentally and numerically an unexpected spectral asymmetry in the saturated-gain spectrum of single-pump fiber optical parametric amplifiers. The interaction between higher-order four-wave mixing products and dispersive waves radiated as an effect of third-order dispersion influences the energy transfer to the signal, depending on its detuning with respect to the pump, and breaks the symmetry of the gain expected from phase-matching considerations in unsaturated amplifiers. The asymmetry feature of the saturated spectrum is shown to particularly depend on the dispersion characteristics of the amplifier and shows local maxima for specific dispersion values.