Very high efficiency spectral inverter for fiber dispersion compensation

Summary form only given. Mid-span spectral inversion can overcome the limitations set by chromatic dispersion on high-bit-rate transmission based on conventional fibers (i.e., fibers dispersion-optimized at 1300 nm) and combat fiber nonlinearities. Here we demonstrate a high efficiency and cost saving optical spectral inverter (SI) exploiting the modulation instability (MI) effect. Theoretical considerations show that the parametric gain of MI can lead to a substantial improvement of the conversion efficiency when a strong pump signal (about 17 dBm) is injected into a dispersion-shifted fiber in the anomalous dispersion regime. Such a SI is a completely transparent device, which contains just one booster optical fiber amplifier (OFA).