Optical Phase Quantizer Based on Phase Sensitive Four Wave Mixing at Low Nonlinear Phase Shifts

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate a new phase sensitive scheme based on four-wave mixing followed by a polarizer to achieve an ideal binary step-like phase transfer function at nonlinear phase shifts as low as 0.3 radians by significantly increasing the parametric de-amplification component. Phase-sensitive operation is obtained by polarization mixing the phase-locked and orthogonally-polarized signal and idler, which is generated in a degenerate dual-pump vector parametric amplifier.