All-optical NRZ-to-RZ format conversion at 10 Gbit/s with 1-to-4 wavelength multicasting exploiting cross-phase modulation & four-wave-mixing in single dispersion-flattened highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber

© 2015 Taylor & Francis.All-optical NRZ-to-RZ format conversion with a function of wavelength multicasting is proposed in this paper, which is realized by exploiting cross-phase modulation (XPM) and four-wave-mixing (FWM) in a dispersion-flattened highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber (DF-HNL-PCF). The designed format converter is experimentally demonstrated, for which the 1-to-4 wavelength multicasting is achieved simultaneously by filtering out two FWM idler waves and both blue-chirped and red-chirped components of the broadened NRZ spectrum induced by XPM. Moreover, the wavelength tunability and dynamic characteristics of the proposed NRZ-to-RZ format converter are also exploited using the different central wavelengths of an optical clock signal and varying the input optical power at a DF-HNL-PCF in our experiment. It is shown that the designed format converter can possess a wide range of operational wavelength over 17 nm, an optimal extinction ratio of 11.6 dB, and a Q-factor of 7.1, respectively. Since the proposed scheme uses an optical fiber-based configuration and is easy for implementation, it can be very useful for future applications in advanced fiber-optic communication networks.