An optical mode multiplexer was newly designed and fabricated using LiNbO3 waveguides. The multiplexer consists of an asymmetric directional coupler capable of achieving the phase-matching condition by the voltage adjustment. The mode conversion efficiency between TM0 and TM1 modes was quantitatively measured to be 0.86 at maximum.

Optical phase conjugation (OPC) is an all-optical signal processing technique for mitigating fiber nonlinearity and is promising for building cost-efficient fiber networks with few optic-electric-optic conversions and long amplification spacing. In lumped amplified systems, OPC has a little nonlinearity mitigation efficiency for nonlinear distortion induced by cross-phase modulation (XPM) due to the asymmetry of power and chromatic dispersion (CD) maps during propagation in transmission fiber. In addition, the walk-off of XPM-induced noise becomes small due to the CD compensation effect of OPC, so the deterministic nonlinear distortion increases. Therefore, lumped amplified transmission systems with OPC are more sensitive to channel spacing than conventional systems. In this paper, we show the channel spacing dependence of NZ-DSF transmission using amplification repeater with OPC. Numerical simulations show comprehensive characteristics between channel spacing and CD in a 100-Gbps/λ WDM signal. An experimental verification using periodically poled LiNbO3-based OPC is also performed. These results suggest that channel spacing design is more important in OPC-assisted systems than in conventional dispersion-unmanaged systems.

We evaluated the noise properties of a periodically poled lithium niobite phase-sensitive amplifier (PSA) using a phase-locked local oscillator as a pump generated by an optical phase-locked loop (OPLL-LO). To examine whether or not the LO pump generated by an OPLL degrades the noise figure (NF) of the PSA, we compared the noise levels of a PSA using an OPLL-LO with that of one using a master local oscillator (M-LO) that utilizes the master light itself as a pump in the electrical domain. With the OPLL, the phase-locked local light had almost the same frequency noise components as the master light. We observed almost the same output noise spectra for the OPLL-LO PSA and M-LO PSA and confirmed the absence of excess noise components in the OPLL-LO PSA in the 0.1 to 20-GHz range. The OPLL-LO PSA exhibited low-noise amplification with an average NF of 1.7-dB at a 23.2-dB gain within an input power range of -31 to -21dBm, which is a feasible input power for repeater amplifiers used in the optical signal transmission systems. We also investigated the influence of the noisy master light, which emulates the accumulation of optical noise from the amplifiers in the transmission system. The OPLL-LO PSA was highly tolerant to the optical noise because the difference in the NF was negligibly small within a master light OSNR range of 5 to 55dB. These results indicate that the OPLL-LO PSA will be useful as a low-noise repeater amplifier for the spectrally efficient large-capacity photonic networks of the future.

We developed a polarization-independent and reserved-band-less complementary spectral inverted optical phase conjugation (CSI-OPC) device using dual-band difference frequency generation based on highly efficient periodically poled LiNbO3 waveguide technologies. To examine the nonlinearity mitigation in a long-haul transmission using a large number of OPCs, we installed a CSI-OPC device in the middle of a pure silica core fiber-based recirculating loop transmission line with a length of 320km. First, we examined the fiber-input power tolerance after 5,120-km and 6,400-km transmission using 22.5-Gbaud PDM-16QAM 10-channel DWDM signals and found a Q-factor improvement of over 1.3dB along with enhanced power tolerance thanks to mitigating the fiber nonlinearity. We then demonstrated transmission distance extension using the CSI-OPC device. The use of multiple CSI-OPCs enables an obvious performance improvements attained by extending the transmission distance from 6,400km to 8,960km, which corresponds to applying the CSI-OPC device 28 times. Moreover, there was no Q-factor degradation for the link in a linear regime after applying the CSI-OPC device more than 16 times. These results demonstrate that the CSI-OPC device can improve the nonlinear tolerance of PDM-16QAM signals without an excess penalty.

We propose a highly sensitive carrier-recovery system for in-line amplification for binary phase shift keying (BPSK) signals in a periodically poled LiNbO3 based phase sensitive amplifier (PSA). We applied a discrete two-stage second harmonic generation/difference frequency generation (SHG/DFG) parametric conversion scheme to enhance the sensitivity of the carrier recovery. Owing to this two-stage SHG/DFG scheme, the conversion efficiency of the seed light for the injection locking needed for the pump generation can be improved compared to that of the cascaded SHG/DFG scheme. The new discrete scheme might also prevent the SNR degradation of the seed light caused by the ASE from the booster EDFA compared with the previous system that used the cascaded scheme. This novel carrier-recovery system exhibits high sensitivity with the SNR of over 7.8dB of the seed light, while tapped signal power is as low as -50dBm, which is low enough for injection locking. The new in-line PSA with this carrier-recovery system exhibits high gain of over 11dB. Since we successfully obtained the high gain property, we tried multistage amplification taking into account practical use and achieved it with both a high gain of 20dB and a noise figure that is almost as low as the standard quantum limit of a PSA.

This paper describes improvement of the gain in the Er-doped lithium niobate waveguide optical amplifiers. A new configuration is proposed, which is loaded with a high-index cladding for the purpose of realizing a larger overlap between the guided light fields and doped Er ion-concentration. It is shown by theoretical simulations and also by experiments that the clad is advantageous to shifts of the light fields toward the substrate surface, and that the overlap between the light field and Er ion-concentration becomes large. Improved optical gains are measured for a fabricated device with a thin-TiO2 clad in the LiNbO3 substrate.

A two-waveguide tapered velocity coupler is presented for a variable divider of optical beams. The coupler consists of one tapered slab waveguide in dimension and the other slab waveguide with a constant film thickness. It is assumed that the device is fabricated on a LiNbO3 substrate, with a push/pull external electric field parallel with the optic axis applied only in the film regions of the coupler. Various numerical simulations through the finite difference beam propagation analysis show that a wide range of dividing ratios from - 15 dB to 15 dB or more can be achieved with considerably small values of driving-voltage electrode-length product and that the dividing characteristics are stable over a wide range of frequencies.