Abstract

Optical frequency conversion is of great interest for photonic switching. Particularly, the conversion using NDFWM (nearly degenerate four-wave mixing) in a TWA (traveling wave semiconductor optical amplifier) employing two pump lasers proposed by Heinrich-Hertz-Institut¹ seems to be attractive in its high conversion efficiency (>−10 dB) and large wavelength conversion range (>10 nm). However, the phase noises of the signal laser, local laser and two pump lasers are summed by the NDFWM process and can seriously degrade the quality of the received signal. For this reason, narrowed linewidth (<100 kHz) external cavity lasers¹ or subcarrier modulation schemes^2,3 were used in previous experiments. This paper proposes a novel phase noise cancellation (PNC) method for optical frequency conversion, which enables the use of DFB lasers and is not restricted in modulation schemes.

© 1992 Optical Society of America