We report the first double-nested antiresonant hollow core fiber. The fiber matches the loss of commercial solid core fibers in the C-band (0.174 dB/km) and fundamentally improves it (0.22 dB/km) in the O-band.

For over 50 years, pure or doped silica glass optical fibres have been an unrivalled platform for the transmission of laser light and optical data at wavelengths from the visible to the near infra-red. Rayleigh scattering, arising from frozen-in density fluctuations in the glass, fundamentally limits the minimum attenuation of these fibres and hence restricts their application, especially at shorter wavelengths. Guiding light in hollow (air) core fibres offers a potential way to overcome this insurmountable attenuation limit set by the glass’s scattering, but requires reduction of all the other loss-inducing mechanisms. Here we report hollow core fibres, of nested antiresonant design, with losses comparable or lower than achievable in solid glass fibres around technologically relevant wavelengths of 660, 850, and 1060 nm. Their lower than Rayleigh scattering loss in an air-guiding structure offers the potential for advances in quantum communications, data transmission, and laser power delivery.

We have successfully demonstrated all-optical wavelength conversion of a 640-Gbit/s line-rate return-to-zero differential phase-shift keying (RZ-DPSK) signal based on low-power four wave mixing (FWM) in a silicon photonic chip with a switching energy of only ~110 fJ/bit. The waveguide dispersion of the silicon nanowire is nano-engineered to optimize phase matching for FWM and the switching power used for the signal processing is low enough to reduce nonlinear absorption from two-photon-absorption (TPA). These results demonstrate that high-speed wavelength conversion is achievable in silicon chips with high data integrity and indicate that high-speed operation can be obtained at moderate power levels where nonlinear absorption due to TPA and free-carrier absorption (FCA) is not detrimental. This demonstration can potentially enable high-speed optical networks on a silicon photonic chip.

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Abstract:We demonstrate a field trial of a 640-Gbaud NRZ signal generated by RZ-to-NRZ conversion of a phase-coherent RZ-OTDM signal. This is employed in a 1.19-Tbit/s PDM-NRZ-OOK field transmission with BER< 3.8×10 -3 for all 128 tributaries.

Abstract:We report the first demonstration of polarisation insensitive alloptical wavelength conversion (AOWC) for single wavelength channel 640 Gbit/s return-to-zero differential-phase-shift-keying (RZ-DPSK) signal and 1.28 Tbit/s polarisation multiplexed (Pol-Mux) RZ-DPSK signals using a 100-m polarisation-maintaining highly nonlinear fiber (PM-HNLF) in a polarisation diversity loop configuration. The AOWC is based on four-wave mixing in PM-HNLF. Error free performance is achieved for the wavelength converted signals. Less than 0.5 dB polarisation sensitivity is obtained.

Abstract-This paper reports on the utilization of the timedomain optical Fourier transformation (OFT) technique for serial-to-parallel conversion of optical time division multiplexed (OTDM) data tributaries into dense wavelength division multiplexed (DWDM) channels. The OFT is implemented by using a dispersive medium followed by phase modulation; the latter being achieved by a four-wave mixing process with linearly chirped pump pulses. Both numerical and experimental investigations of the OTDM-to-WDM conversion technique are carried out. Experimental validations are performed on 320-and 640-Gbit/s OTDM data with error-free performance.Index Terms-All-optical demultiplexing, four-wave mixing (FWM), optical time division multiplexing (OTDM), serial-toparallel conversion, spectral compression, wavelength division multiplexing (WDM).

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