Wideband continuously tunable optical delay line based on wavelength conversion in reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers and fiber dispersion

Abstract

Two schemes of all-optical tunable delay line are proposed and experimentally demonstrated based on wavelength conversion in reflective semiconductor optical amplifiers (RSOAs) and group-velocity dispersion (GVD) in optical fiber. In the first scheme, large optical delays are shown for a 10 Gbits/s non-return-to-zero (NRZ) signal at short wavelength in the C band. In the second scheme, large optical delays are obtained in the whole C band. The proposed schemes achieve continuously tunable delays with nearly no pulse broadening and very little spectral distortion.