Feedforward noise reduction of incoherent light for spectrum-sliced transmission at 2.5 Gb/s

We demonstrate wideband reduction of excess intensity noise in an incoherent light source by an optoelectronic feedforward technique. The technique allows significantly narrower optical bandwidths to be used in high-bit rate spectrum-sliced communication systems. We use this technique to successfully transmit data at 2.5 Gb/s over 40 km of standard fiber using a polarized 0.23-nm bandwidth slice of incoherent light. The scheme requires broadband the addition of only a few components to the transmitting node source and uses a single optical modulator for data modulation and feedforward noise reduction.