Demonstration of all-optical Mach-Zehnder demultiplexer

Abstract

A new type of ultrafast all-optical switch based on a Mach-Zehnder configuration has been demonstrated using the same wavelength and polarisation for both clock and data signals. A 10 ps switching window was measured with a 0.65 pJ clock pulse at 1.313 μm

High resolution time-to-space conversion of sub-picosecond pulses at 155µm by non-degenerate SFG in PPLN crystal

“…Direct or coherent optoelectronic detection of terabaud OTDM is not possible due to electric circuit bandwidth limitations. Generally all-optical demultiplexing using a fast nonlinear optical interaction is required; examples include the nonlinear optical loop mirror switch [2][3][4], the semiconductor optical amplifier based Mach-Zehnder switch [5][6][7], cross-absorption modulation [8,9] and four-wave mixing in silicon, silicon-organic hybrid or chalcogenide χ (3) nonlinear waveguides [10][11][12][13]. While each technique has its own advantages and disadvantages, their operation principles limit them to single sub-channel (tributary) extraction from the OTDM channel.…”

Real-time coherent detection of phase modulated ultrashort pulses after time-to-space conversion and spatial demultiplexing

“…OTDM demultiplexing is more challenging and several demultiplexing techniques have been investigated. These include the nonlinear optical loop mirror [4,5], XPM-based Mach-Zehnder switch [6,7], FWM-based spectral filtering extraction [8,9] and coherent detection by parallel optical sampling with a pulsed local oscillator [10]. All these methods however are limited to single bit extraction, with multiple devices needed to completely demultiplex the OTDM channel.…”