Chip-based Brillouin processing for carrier recovery in coherent optical communications
Abstract
Modern fiber-optic coherent communications employ advanced spectrally-efficient modulation formats that require sophisticated narrow linewidth local oscillators (LOs) and complex digital signal processing (DSP). Here, we establish a novel approach to carrier recovery harnessing large-gain stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) on a photonic chip for up to 116.82 Gbit/sec self-coherent optical signals, eliminating the need for a separate LO. In contrast to SBS processing on-fiber, our solution provides phase and polarization stability while the narrow SBS linewidth allows for a record-breaking small guardband of ~265 MHz, resulting in higher spectral-efficiency than benchmark self-coherent schemes. This approach reveals comparable performance to state-of-the-art coherent optical receivers without requiring advanced DSP. Our demonstration develops a low-noise and frequency-preserving filter that synchronously regenerates a low-power narrowband optical tone that could relax the requirements on very-high-order modulation signaling and be useful in long-baseline interferometry for precision optical timing or reconstructing a reference tone for quantum-state measurements.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1712.03142,
title = {Chip-based Brillouin processing for carrier recovery in coherent optical communications},
author = {Elias Giacoumidis and Amol Choudhary and Eric Magi and David Marpaung and Khu Vu and Pan Ma and Duk-Yong Choi and Steve Madden and Bill Corcoran and Mark Pelusi and Benjamin J. Eggleton},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1712.03142},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
Part of this work has been presented as a postdealine paper at CLEO Pacific-Rim'2017 and OSA Optica