We report the fabrication of a highly nonlinear holey fiber made from pure silica with an effective area of just ~2.8mu;m(2) at 1550 nm. We believe this to be the smallest effective area yet measured for a holey fiber at 1550 nm. We also report the operation of a 2R regenerative optical switch based on just 3.3 m of the fiber that is shown to have 30 times the nonlinear figure of merit of previous devices based on dispersion-shifted fiber.

Abstract-In this letter, we demonstrate the use of an optical thresholder-based on a short length of holey fiber to achieve enhanced code recognition quality in a 255-chip 320-Gchip/s superstructured fiber Bragg grating-based optical code-division multiple access code : decode system. The nonlinear thresholder is based on bandpass filtering of spectrally broadened components generated by self-phase modulation and assisted by the Raman effect in an 8.7 m length of highly nonlinear holey fiber. Error free penalty free system performance is obtained with complete recovery of the original input pulse shape.

Abstract-In this letter, we report the fabrication and application of 255-chip 320 Gchip/s quaternary phase superstructure fiber Bragg gratings (SSFBGs) for optical code generation and recognition in a four-channel wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM)/optical code-division-multiplexing (OCDM) experiment. Individual users of the system operate with different coding schemes, repetition rates, and wavelengths. Our experiments show that a single SSFBG can be used to perform simultaneous optical decoding and wavelength channel selection.

In this paper we present significant progress on the fabrication of small-core lead-silicate holey fibers. The glass used in this work is SF57, a commercially available, highly nonlinear Schott glass. We report the fabrication of small core SF57 fibers with a loss as low as 2.6 dB/m at 1550 nm, and the fabrication of fibers with a nonlinear coefficient as high as 640 W-1 km-1. We demonstrate the generation of Raman solitons at ~1550 nm in a short length of such a fiber which highlights the fact that the group velocity dispersion can be anomalous at these wavelengths despite the large normal material dispersion of the glass around 1550nm., "Four-wave mixing based 10-Gb/s tunable wavelength conversion using a holey fiber with a high SBS threshold," IEEE Photon. Technol. Lett. 15, 440-442 (2003).

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