Abstract

Recently, signal conversion from 1.5 to 1.3 μm has been demonsitrated experimentally by designing special loop fibers to reduce group-velocity mismatch [1], splicing alternating segments of different kinds of fibers to arrive at average group-velocity matching [2], and delaying two counterpropagating control beams to realize walk-off balance [3]. In the wavelength conversion, the control on the shape and size of the switching window is very important because it determines the performances of the converter such as timing jitter, speed of conversion, and the shape and width of the signal output. Here we propose and theoretically analyze a novel nonlinear fiber loop mirror (NFLM) [4, 5] wavelength converter. The characteristics of the switching window can be controlled by adjusting the opposite group-velocity delays in the standard single mode fiber (SMF) and the dispersion shift fiber (DSF) as well as the width of the control pulse. This NFLM has two output ports providing pulses with different profiles and has the flexibility to be adopted in a variety of system applications.

© 1997 Optical Society of America