Nonlinear Pulse Reshaping With Highly Birefringent Photonic Crystal Fiber for OCDMA Receivers

We combine an erbium-doped fiber amplifier with a short segment of highly birefringent photonic crystal fiber to generate a nonlinear transfer function suitable for optical transmission systems based on optical code-division multiple-access (OCDMA). Such a functional element based on spectral broadening followed by an off-center narrow optical filtering provides an effective suppression of spurious signals such as multiple-access interferences in OCDMA receivers and can reduce the pulses amplitude jitter.