Design of polarity-preserved or polarity-inverted wavelength converters using cross-phase modulation in a highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber with flat dispersion **This work is supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) within the framework of the CAS/SAFEA International Partnership Program for Creative Research Teams. This work was carried out while ZQH was a PhD candidate at the State Key Laboratory

Abstract

In this paper, we propose the design of tunable and robust wavelength converters which can perform the polarity-preserved or polarity-inverted wavelength conversion by using the cross-phase modulation (XPM) in a dispersion-flattened highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber (DF-HNL-PCF). The newly designed wavelength converter consists of a DF-HNL-PCF and an optical band-pass filter in the simple straight-line configuration, where XPM leads to broadening the spectrum of a continuous-wave probe light and the polarity-preserved, tunable wavelength conversion is then implemented by filtering out the blue-chirped or red-chirped spectral component of a probe light. The experimental results show that the polarity-preserved wavelength converter using a DF-HNL-PCF can achieve the error-free conversion of 10 Gbit s−1 optical data signals with the maximum power penalty of less than 2.1 dB over a wavelength range of nearly 34 nm. This wavelength tunability is actually limited by an operational wavelength range of the tunable optical band-pass filter that is used to extract the wavelength-converted signal in our experiment. Moreover, the polarity-inverted wavelength conversion is observed at the XPM-based wavelength converter using a DF-HNL-PCF, for the first time. This is achieved by tuning the central wavelength of an optical band-pass filter to coincide with that of a chirped probe light.