Effect of optical pulse shaping and adaptive equalization on the performance of 100G DP-QPSK WDM system

Dual polarization quadrature phase shifting keying (DP-QPSK) modulation format along with coherent receiver helps in increasing the data carrying capability of existing optical networks without any major change in existing transmission infrastructure. The various linear and nonlinear fiber effects, frequency and phase errors are corrected in electrical domain at the receiver end with digital back propagation algorithms (DBP) instead of in-line compensation. In such a case the selection of optimum values of system parameters make the task easier for DBP algorithms. This paper highlights the importance of finding optimum operating point of continuous modulus algorithm (CMA) for better adaptive equalization (AE). The paper also discusses the optical pulse shaping using Gaussian optical band-pass filter to improve the spectral characteristics of DP-QPSK signal.

A Numerical Study of Optimization Methods for Phase-Only Optical Pulse-Shaping

The field of optical pulse-shaping and its applications is introduced, with a focus on time-domain approaches. A numerical investigation of all-fiber, time-domain, phase-only filtering is conducted for arbitrary temporal pulse synthesis. The theoretical phase modulation function required for generating use- specific target-intensity profiles is calculated using different optimization methods including a Brute Force Monte Carlo search, the Simulated Annealing method and the Genetic Algorithm method. The convergence speed, computational complexity and accuracy of these methods is compared under binary phase-only modulation, where the Genetic algorithm was found to outperform other methods.

Ultrafast optical pulse shaping using dielectric metasurfaces

Advances in ultrafast lasers, chirped pulse amplifiers, and frequency comb technology require fundamentally new pulse-modulation strategies capable of supporting unprecedentedly large bandwidth and high peak power while maintaining high spectral resolution. We demonstrate how dielectric metasurfaces can be leveraged to shape the temporal profile of a near-infrared femtosecond pulse. Finely tailored pulse-shaping operations, including splitting, compression, chirping, and higher-order distortion, are achieved using a Fourier-transform setup embedding metasurfaces able to manipulate, simultaneously and independently, the amplitude and phase of the constituent frequency components of the pulse. Exploiting metasurfaces to manipulate the temporal characteristics of light expands their impact and opens new vistas in the field of ultrafast science and technology.