A high-efficiency tunable polarization-insensitive wavelength convertor based on degenerate four-wave mixing in a highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber

A high-efficiency tunable polarization-insensitive all-optical wavelength convertor for 10 Gb/s return-to-zero on-off keying (RZ-OOK) signals using degenerate four-wave mixing (FWM) in a highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber (PCF) is demonstrated. The residual birefringence in the 50 m dispersion-flattened PCF with 11 W-1·km-1 nonlinear coefficient guarantees the FWM-based wavelength conversion to be polarization-insensitive when the pump polarization is exactly at 45° to the birefringent axes of the PCF. Experimental results show that with 45° pump launch, the polarization dependence of FWM in the PCF can be decreased to less than 0.6 dB over the entire 25 nm conversion bandwidth. The optical signal-to-noise ratios (OSNR) of the converted signals are better than 40 dB and the conversion efficiencies are better than -15 dB over the conversion range with 10 Gb/s signal polarization-scrambled