Phase regeneration of phase encoded signals by hybrid optical phase squeezer

We present a new method to perform phase regeneration of phase encoded signals. In our concept called "hybrid optical phase squeezer (HOPS)," a multilevel phase-quantized signal is synthesized through the coherent addition of a phase-conjugate copy of the signal and a phase harmonic of the signal with a frequency shifter. Unlike the conventional method by phase sensitive amplification, HOPS does not use any optical parametric gain such that only optical elements with low optical nonlinearity are necessary for optical phase quantization. In the proof-of-concept experiment, it is confirmed that a 2-level HOPS can perform quadrature squeezing with an extinction ratio of 40 dB. Simultaneous phase regeneration of two coherent wavelength-division-multiplexed 10.75-Gb/s binary phase-shift keyed signals is successfully demonstrated using a 2-level HOPS based on a semiconductor optical amplifier. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America