Ultrafast Coherent Optical Transmission

This paper presents recent progress toward the realization of ultrahigh-speed coherent optical transmission with a single-channel bit rate of more than 1 Tbit/s using ultrashort pulse technology and an advanced modulation format. We first describe Tbit/s optical time-division multiplexing (OTDM) transmission employing differential binary or quadrature phase shift keying. We present our recent demonstrations of single-polarization 640-Gb/s differential phase-shift keying and 1.28-Tb/s differential quadrature phase-shift keying transmissions over 525 km, which employ an ultrafast optical Fourier transformation technique. We then focus on coherent optical transmission using quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) with a multiplicity of 512 that enables us to achieve an ultrahigh spectral efficiency of more than 10 b/s/Hz. Finally, we demonstrate a novel ultrahigh-speed, spectrally efficient coherent pulse transmission combining OTDM and QAM. A 400 Gb/s, 32 RZ/QAM signal was successfully transmitted over 225 km on a single carrier at 10 Gsymbol/s × 4-OTDM.