Analysis of optical phase-conjugate characteristics of picosecond four-wave mixing signals in semiconductor optical amplifiers

We have analyzed for the first time the optical phase-conjugate characteristics of picosecond four-wave mixing (FWM) signals in semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs) using the finite-difference beam propagation method (FD-BPM). We show that the optical phase-conjugate characteristics of the FWM signals are strongly dependent on input pump pulsewidths. As a typical example, we have demonstrated that SOAs act as an ideal phase-conjugator, within the confines of reversing the chirp of optical pulses, for a 10-ps input pump pulse and a /spl sim/2.2-ps linearly chirped input probe pulse. When the pulsewidth of pump pulse becomes short, the minimum compressed pulsewidth is obtained by using a fiber shorter in length than the input fiber, but having the same group velocity dispersion as the input fiber. For a much shorter pump pulse such as 1 ps, the short FWM signal can be obtained via the gating characteristics of the FWM. However, only a part of the phase information is copied to the FWM signal due to such gating characteristics. The phase information is also degraded due to the fast nonlinear effect in the SOA. Thus, the pulsewidth is not compressed by propagation through a dispersive medium.