Experimental study on an all-optical switching based on MF-NOLM

In this paper, the experiment on an all-optical switching is reported based on a microstructure fiber(MF)-nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM). In the experiment, a 25-meter-long MF (γ=36W−1km−1@1550 nm) is used as a nonlinear medium of the nonlinear optical loop mirror and the input signal is generated by a 10 GHz tunable picosecond laser source, with a full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of 2 ps and centered at 1550 nm. With the increase of input power, a π nonlinear phase shift is obtained by a 40/60 coupler in the experiment, but the same result can not be found by a 48/52 coupler. Additionally, the switching devices can also be used as an all-optical regeneration.