Improvement of amplitude and phase margins in an RZ optical receiver using Kerr nonlinearity in normal dispersion fiber

We propose a new return-to-zero (RZ) optical receiver to improve the amplitude and phase margins without increasing the intersymbol interference by utilizing Kerr nonlinearity in normal dispersion fiber. We employed this technique to a jitter-limited 10-Gb/s optical soliton transmission experiment at 16000 km in a sliding frequency recirculating loop. The amplitude and phase margins obtained with the proposed method were 67% and 18% wider than that with the conventional RZ receiver using a 7.5-GHz low-pass filter.