Numerical analysis of Sagnac loop incorporating a semiconductor optical amplifier to suppress the unmodulated optical carrier in the time domain

This paper describes the conception, design and numerical simulations of a temporal filter able to suppress unmodulated optical carrier. It is based on a fibre-optic Sagnac loop incorporating a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA) presenting around 1 ns gain recovery time. Numerical simulations using the VPI Transmission Maker™ platform were carried out regarding a large optical offset with 5 Gb/s binary digital stream or 2.5 GHz sinusoidal (analogue) buried signals.