A tunable wavelength conversion and wavelength add/drop scheme based on cascaded second-order nonlinearity with double-pass configuration

Abstract

A selective and tunable wavelength conversion and wavelength add/drop scheme based on sum- and difference-frequency generation (SFG+DFG) is proposed, in which the concept of "double-pass" is introduced. An arbitrary channel can be dropped from a wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) signal and added to another WDM signal at arbitrary wavelength. The channel to be dropped is selected and depleted (dropped) by adjusting the pump 1 through sum frequency generation (SFG) during the forward propagation. Subsequently, the difference frequency generation (DFG), taking place during the backward propagation, is employed to convert (add) the dropped channel to another channel in another WDM signal by adjusting the pump 2. For the dropped and added channel, the phase matching of SFG and DFG are nearly perfect and the theoretical expressions are derived under the assumption that the two pumps are undepleted. The power of pump 1 is optimized to deplete the dropped channel completely, while that of pump 2 is chosen to maximize the output power of the added channel. Numerical calculations are performed to investigate the propagation of the other channels whose phase is mismatched. To suppress the crosstalk, the spacing of the WDM channels is chosen to be 0.2 nm (25 GHz). We have also compared our scheme with others (such as the single-pass scheme and the double waveguide scheme) and shown that ours possesses several distinct advantages.