title: Regenerative properties of interferometricall-optical DPSK wavelength converters.
abstract: We discuss an all-optical DPSK wavelength conversion scheme comprising a delay-interferometer demodulation stage followed by a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, the arms of which are formed by nonlinear waveguides. If operated properly, the configuration shows regenerative behaviour. This is true for nonlinear waveguides with a dominant cross-gain nonlinearity (e. g., for an electro-absorption amplitude modulator) as well as for the case of a dominant cross-phase nonlinearity (e. g., for Kerr effect based phase modulator). In addition, we show that nonlinear materials exhibiting cross-gain modulation properties can provide a binary phase response so far only known from the transfer functions of digital electronics.
authors.affiliation: Institute of Photonics and Quantum Electronics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, 76131 Karlsruhe, Germany. jin.wang@hhi.fraunhofer.de
authors.forename: Jin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Ayan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Maitra
authors.forename: Wolfgang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Freude
authors.forename: Juerg
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Leuthold
mesh_terms: D000669:Amplifiers, Electronic; D017076:Computer-Aided Design; D004867:Equipment Design; D019544:Equipment Failure Analysis; D007368:Interferometry / Q000295:instrumentation*; D055096:Optical Devices; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation*; D013685:Telecommunications / Q000295:instrumentation*