CIPS/OSA Brown Bag Seminar Series

Thursday, March 13, 2008

12 noon , RLE Haus Conf. Room 36-428

"On the temporal Talbot effect in optical communication systems"

Dominik Pudo

The temporal Talbot effect, whose roots date back to the early nineteenth century, manifests through the self-imaging of optical pulse trains as they propagate through a dispersive medium, such a typical optical fiber. For specific dispersion values, the interference in between consecutive, broadened optical pulses results in a perfect reconstruction of the incident periodic signal. This simple feature has proven to be particularly interesting within the context of lightwave communication systems. Three distinct aspects of the Talbot effect will be examined in this talk - first, we will focus on its features and limitations subject to realistic input conditions, such as amplitude noise and timing jitter. We subsequently demonstrate the application of the Talbot effect towards pulse repetition rate multiplication using cascaded fiber Bragg gratings as the dispersive medium, with an output repetition rate exceeding 100 GHz. We finalize our study by exploring and characterizing the Talbot effect for all-optical clock recovery.