Pulse restoration by filtering of self-phase modulation broadened optical spectrum

Restoration of distorted optical pulses is achieved using nonlinear fiber self-phase spectral broadening and subsequent optical band-pass filtering of a single sideband. Using this technique, the output pulsewidth is shown to remain constant for input pulse-widths between 9-20 ps. A detailed investigation of the signal-to-noise ratio shows that best performance is obtained by operating in normal fiber dispersion regime. This technique is also applied to restore 40 Gb/s RZ-data suffering distortion from polarization mode dispersion. The high-bandwidth fiber nonlinearity shows promise to scale to higher bit rate pulse distortion correction.