Single-laser 32.5 Tbit/s Nyquist WDM transmission

We demonstrate single-laser 32.5 Tbit/s 16QAM Nyquist wavelength division multiplexing transmission over a total length of 227 km of SMF-28 without optical dispersion compensation. A number of 325 optical carriers is derived from a single laser and encoded with dual-polarization 16QAM data using sinc-shaped Nyquist pulses. As we use no guard bands, the carriers have a spacing of 12.5 GHz equal to the symbol rate or Nyquist bandwidth of the data. We achieve a net spectral efficiency of 6.4 bit/s/Hz using a software-defined transmitter, which generates the electric drive signals for the electro-optic modulator in real time.