Periodically amplified transmission system based on loss compensating dispersion decreasing fibre

Abstract

Amplified transmission lines based on loss compensating dispersion decreasing fibres (LCDDFs), i.e. fibres in which the dispersion profile is made to follow that of the fibre loss, are a promising medium for the transmission of high bit-rate, ultrashort soliton pulses. Due to the perfect match between nonlinearity and dispersion at all points in the fibre LCDDFs provide access to propagation regimes (both single channel and WDM) made inaccessible by the periodic amplification process in systems based on conventional dispersion shifted fibre (DSF). To date soliton loss compensation has only been demonstrated in single pulse, single span propagation experiments. In this presentation, we describe the first experimental demonstration of a periodically amplified transmission system based on LCDDFs. We report error free transmission of: (a) 10 Gbit/s, 6.5ps pulses over 8 amplification cycles (304km) for a system with a mean dispersion of 2.4ps/(nm.km) and 38km amplifier spacing, L). The results indicate the potential of the technique to enter propagation regimes made inaccessible by conventional average soliton techniques. The measurements also highlight the limiting effect of the soliton acoustic interaction which can be severe in these types of system, in which the minimum realistically achievable RMS path average dispersion tends to be higher than that of a conventional DSF system. The limiting effects of third order dispersion are also observed.

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ORCID for D.J. Richardson: orcid.org/0000-0002-7751-1058

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