Fibre Optical Parametric Amplifiers for Communications

We present our recent achievements with polarisation-insensitive fibre optical parametric amplifiers (PI-FOPAs) for optical communications. We have demonstrated a robust fully automated (black-box) PI-FOPA operation in the C and L bands simultaneously with gain of ~20 dB and output power over 23 dBm when amplifying polarisation-multiplexed WDM QAM signals and a bursty traffic. Additionally, we have demonstrated a PI-FOPA to amplify WDM signals in the S band and across a continuous bandwidth of 40 nm. Finally, we have demonstrated a power budget improvement of a transient-sensitive link by up to 8 dB when employing a PI-FOPA with noise figure of ~6 dB as a drop-in replacement of an EDFA.