Optical phase erasure based on FWM in HNLF enabling format conversion from 320-Gb/s RZDQPSK to 160-Gb/s RZ-DPSK

Through four-wave mixing (FWM) process in highly-nonlinear fiber (HNLF) or semiconductor device, the phase-modulation depth of one converted FWM component could be doubled compared with that of the original input signal. Therefore, with a multilevel phase-modulated signal and a CW light as inputs, after FWM process in a nonlinear media, phase pattern (0, pi) carried in the input multilevel phase-modulated signal will not be transferred to one converted FWM component, which could be referred to as an optical phase erasure process. We experimentally demonstrated format conversion from 320-Gb/s return-to-zero differential quadrature phase-shift keying (RZ-DQPSK) to 160-Gb/s return-to-zero differential phase-shift keying (RZ-DPSK) through the proposed all-optical phase erasure scheme. The phase information carried in the converted binary RZ-DPSK is logically equal to the input Q-component, or a logical XOR operation result between I and Q components of the input RZ-DQPSK, which correspond to a serial or parallel DQPSK transmitter for the input RZ-DQPSK signal. It can be applied to erase a binary tributary from a multilevel modulation format.