Tsymbol/s Optical Coding Based on Long-Period Gratings

A novel time-domain ultrafast optical pulse shaping approach using long-period fiber gratings (LPGs) is proposed. The technique is based on exploiting a superluminal space-to-time mapping effect in weak-coupling LPGs and it enables the synthesis of arbitrary complex optical waveforms with femtosecond features using feasible and simple LPG profiles, e.g., with spatial grating-apodization resolutions above the millimeter range. The approach is numerically demonstrated by the generation of multi-Tsymbol/s serial optical data streams under complex coding (e.g., QPSK and 16-QAM) formats.