Optical differentiators and integrators: Recent advances and applications, and enormous potential applications

This paper presents an overview of recent advances and applications of temporal optical differentiators (ODs) and temporal optical integrators (OIs). The existing applications of ODs include ultrawideband communications (UWB), optical metrology, dispersion-managed soliton pulse generation for ultrahigh-speed soliton transmission systems, ultrashort flat-top pulse generation for the demultiplexing of 640 Gbit/s data in ultrahigh-speed optical communication systems, and optical computing. The existing applications of OIs include optical computing, optical memory and optical analog-to-digital converter (OADC). Two novel applications of an OD are also suggested here and they are laser induced breakdown spectroscopy (LIBS) and non-return-to-zero to pseudo-return-to-zero (NRZ-to-PRZ) data conversion for optical clock recovery in optical communications. The focus here is on amplitude-based rather than intensity-based ODs and OIs.