Experimental Investigation of All-Optical NRZ-DPSK to RZ-DPSK Format Conversion Based on TOAD

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel all-optical non-return-to-zero differential-phase-shift-keying (NRZ-DPSK) to return-to-zero differential-phase-shift-keying (RZ-DPSK) format conversion scheme. This scheme is based on the terahertz optical asymmetric demultiplexer (TOAD). A 10 Gb/s converted RZ-DPSK signal is obtained with a wide duty cycle tuning range from 16% to 66%. For all converted RZ-DPSK signals, the receiver sensitivities at BER of 10^?9 are 0.4 to 1.7 dB higher compared with the original NRZ-DPSK signal. The clear and open eye diagrams are presented to demonstrate the high quality format conversion performance. Moreover, the optical spectra show that this conversion is in a wavelength-preserving operation.