Demonstration of $V_{\pi}$ Reduction in Electrooptic Modulators Using Modulation Instability

Reduction in the operating voltage of electrooptic modulators is needed, in order to remove the bottleneck in the flow of data between electronics and optical interconnects. We report an experimental demonstration of a tenfold reduction in an electrooptic modulator's half-wave voltage up to 50 GHz. This was achieved by employing optical sideband-only amplification.