All-Optical Tb/S 3R Wavelength Conversion Using Dispersion-Managed Light Bullets

We present an all-optical wavelength converter that can operate at a very-high-switching rate with simultaneous reshaping, retiming, and regenerating (3R) capabilities based on nonlinear interactions between dispersion-managed (DM) (3+1)-dimensional optical solitons (light bullets). Numerical simulations have been performed to demonstrate the generation of the DM light bullets and the spatial dragging interaction between solitons with different colors for ultrafast wavelength conversion application. This all-optical 3R wavelength converter has a very compact size of 100 mum times 100 mum times 1 mm, and is able to convert information at an ultrahigh speed of over 1 Tb/s between wavelength channels of 50 nm apart. Such an ultrafast all-optical wavelength converter has potential applications in future optical time-division multiplexing (OTDM) and wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) combined communication networks that require both the ultrafast switching speed due to the large bandwidth within each wavelength channel and the wavelength conversion function for exchanging information between different wavelength bands or spatial switching within the same wavelength bands.