Mitigation of Nonlinear Effects on WDM QAM Signals Enabled by Optical Phase Conjugation With Efficient Bandwidth Utilization

We present nonlinear impairment mitigation of wavelength division multiplexed signals, through optical phase conjugation (OPC). We conduct our experiments on a 400-km-long installed fiber link equipped with erbium-doped fiber amplifiers, with the OPC placed close to the middle of the link. Our OPC configuration realizes efficient reuse of the signal bandwidth, avoiding the loss of half of the spectral band typical of most phase conjugating schemes. We demonstrate the operation of the system using both 16- and 64-quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) signals and report Q-factor improvements up to 0.5 and 2.5 dB for 16- and 64-QAM, respectively.