Optical partial regeneration of solitons

摘要

A partial optical regenerator for use in high bit-rate optical systems and useful in WDM applications employing soliton transmission. The regenerator essentially comprises a saturable optical element in a main optical path and a resonant optical circuit coupled to the element. A resonant pulse can be generated from an input data pulse in a number of ways. (A) an input data pulse may be coupled directly to the resonant optical circuit before entering the element; (B) the input data pulse may first saturate the element, resulting in the creation of a counter-propagating pulse; (C) the data pulse may pass through the element and be coupled to the resonant optical circuit upon exit. The resonant pulse travels around the resonant circuit and repeatedly returns to the saturable optical element after an integer multiple of the symbol duration or after an odd integer multiple of half the symbol duration. Successive saturation of the element causes the output data pulses to be better aligned with respect to the center of the symbol interval.