Accurate Estimation of Chromatic Dispersion for Non-Degenerate Phase-Sensitive Amplification

Abstract

A phase-sensitive amplifier (PSA) has the potential of low-noise optical amplification and nonlinear phase noise mitigation. For PSA operation, the chromatic dispersion (CD) that causes gain ripple must be compensated before amplification. We propose an accurate CD estimation method for non-degenerate PSAs (ND-PSAs). We experimentally demonstrated its effectiveness by using periodically poled LiNbO3 waveguides as amplification mediums. We first modified the conventional formula for the gain spectrum under residual CD conditions to be applicable to ND-PSAs by considering phase locking. We then experimentally described the effect of passband narrowing due to the gain ripple on the signal quality using a probabilistically shaped 64QAM signal. Furthermore, we applied the modified formula to CD estimation and compensation. As a result, accurate CD estimation on the sub-ps/nm order and gain-flattened spectrum over 3.5 THz were demonstrated with our method. We also propose a method for estimating residual CD from the gain variation among wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) channels. The possibility of adaptive compensation for CD was shown by carrying out WDM amplification.