Theoretical Analysis and Experimental Investigation of Degenerate Phase-Sensitive Amplification in a Semiconductor Optical Amplifier

The phase-sensitive amplification (PSA) has attracted intensive attention due to its ability to amplify the in-phase component and attenuate the out-of-phase component of an optical signal. This ability leads to several applications in the all-optical signal processing and fiber optic communication, such as the low-noise amplification, the phase regeneration, and so on. The phase-sensitive functionality can be performed with different nonlinear devices, including the high-nonlinear fiber (HNLF), the periodically poled lithium niobate, the semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA), and so on. Most reported schemes are based on the HNLF, while SOA-based PSA research works are rarely reported. In this paper, the characteristics of dual-pump degenerate PSA in the SOA are theoretically analyzed and experimentally investigated. The input power, injection current, and internal loss of the SOA correlated to the PSA are examined. The influence of the involved wavelengths is also considered. Experimental results show good agreement with the numerical calculations. A gain extinction ratio of ~25 dB is experimentally obtained, providing the absolute possibility of the on-chip all-optical signal processing based on PSA in the optic communication system.