Four-wave mixing based 10-Gb/s tunable wavelength conversion using a holey fiber with a high SBS threshold

Abstract

We demonstrate a four-wave-mixing based wavelength converter using a 15-m highly nonlinear holey fiber (HF) with a high stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) threshold. Error-free efficient wavelength conversion of 10-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero signal over a ∼ 10-nm bandwidth is reliably achieved. Our 15-m HF has a nonlinearity coefficient γ ∼ 70(±10) W-1· km-1 and an SBS threshold of more than 130 mW. The high SBS threshold is achieved by applying structural variation to the HF along its length during the fabrication process. No modulational-instability-induced intensity noise on the converted signals is observed due to the normal dispersion of the HF.