Abstract

Fiber based optical parametric amplifiers (OPA) have reached a renewed interest due to the availability of new highly non-linear optical fibers (HNLF)¹ and the possibility of gain outside the Erbium-doped fiber amplifier (EDFA) band. Results may be divided into two subclasses; the coherent OPA² and the incoherent OPA.^3,4 The coherent amplifier boost components of the input signal with the same phase as the average signal while attenuating components with the orthogonal phase. This property offers inline amplifiers with an ideal noise figure of 0 dB⁵ which should be compared to the quantum limited noise figure of 3 dB for incoherent amplifiers. This work will focus on recent experiments on incoherent OPAs aimed at signal reamplification as well as optical time division multiplexed (OTDM) applications such as demultiplexing, short pulse generation, transparent wavelength conversion and optical sampling.

© 2002 Optical Society of America