Abstract

Intraband modulation in semiconductor gain media has recently been shown to provide a wide-band nonlinearity which can be over five orders of magnitude larger than the Kerr nonlinearity in silica fiber. We discuss recent work on the application of this nonlinearity to the wavelength conversion function in all optical networks; specifically, carrier wavelength spectral translation by four-wave mixing in semiconductor traveling-wave amplifiers (TWAs) [1,2,3,4]. In addition to reviewing the performance of these devices, including both a single-channel and two-channel system demonstration, we will describe the underlying physics of the ultra-fast four-wave mixing mechanism and its application to TeraHertz spectroscopy of intraband scattering.

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