Applications of optical nonlinearities for signal processing

This paper presents applications of nonlinear optics and ultrafast pulse lasers for optical information processing. Nonlinear wave mixing process based on three- and four- wave mixing in a second order nonlinear crystal inside the spectral processing device (SPD) is utilized. Signal processing is performed in the temporal frequency domain by spatially dispersing the frequency components in a SPD and performing operations on the spectrally decomposed wave (SDW) using its unique time-domain properties. These techniques enable femtosecond rate space-to-time conversion for multiplexing an ultrahigh bandwidth serial temporal channel onto slower parallel channels.