Phase sensitive amplification based on cascaded SHG/DFG process in a periodically poled lithium niobate waveguide

Phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSAs) have long been known to offer the possibility of amplification with a noise figure below the 3 dB quantum limit of phase insensitive amplifiers (PIA). Other advantages of the PSAs are the potential for optical signal processing, including all optical phase regeneration of phase encoded signals, dispersion compensation and coherent wavelength exchange. PSAs are usually demonstrated using highly nonlinear fibres as the nonlinear element. However, the use of cascaded sum- and difference-frequency generation (cSFG/DFG) of second-order nonlinearities in periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguides offers a number of attractive features relative to corresponding fibre based PSA implementations including the prospect of compact devices, large operational bandwidths and importantly a far greater immunity to the effects of Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) of the pump beams which imposes performance limitations and adds complexity to silica fibre based PSA devices. Herein, we propose and demonstrate both theoretically and experimentally a new scheme for frequency non-degenerate PSA based on the cSHG/DFG process in a single PPLN waveguide