Tunable Optical Dispersion Compensator With Increased Bandwidth via Connection of a Mach–Zehnder Interferometer to an Arrayed-Waveguide Grating

Author

Doerr, C.R. ; Chandrasekhar, S. ; Buhl, L.L.

Author_Institution

Bell Labs., Holmdel

Volume

20

Issue

8

fYear

2008

fDate

4/15/2008 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

560

Lastpage

562

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate a novel colorless tunable optical dispersion compensator (TODC) consisting of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) connected to an ar- rayed-waveguide grating with a thermooptic lens. The MZI approximately doubles the magnitude bandwidth at large dispersion settings. We demonstrate compensation of a 43-Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero signal dispersed over a range of -844 to + 1700 ps/nm. To our knowledge, +1700 ps/nm is the largest demonstrated dispersion compensation amount of a 40-Gb/s signal with a single TODC.

Keywords

Mach-Zehnder interferometers; diffraction gratings; optical dispersion; optical tuning; Mach-Zehnder interferometer; arrayed-waveguide grating; bit rate 40 Gbit/s; bit rate 43 Gbit/s; nonreturn-to-zero signal; thermooptic lens; tunable optical dispersion compensator; Bandwidth; Diffraction gratings; Insertion loss; Lenses; Optical arrays; Optical fiber dispersion; Optical filters; Optical interferometry; Optical waveguides; Phased arrays; Gratings; integrated optics; optical fiber dispersion; wavelength-division multiplexing;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Photonics Technology Letters, IEEE

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1041-1135

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/LPT.2008.918806

Filename

4472042