Abstract
WDM demonstration systems have recently come into adolescence, as represented by a number of research Consortia supported by AREA in the United States and by other agencies abroad.1 What has become increasingly clear in WDM systems is the severe demand for low interchannel cross talk during wavelength routing. Sources of direct and indirect cross talk abound in the optical domain: because of residual off-peak filter transmission, wavelength misalignment penalties and crosstalk, and optical amplifier nonuniformity and gain coupling. In the acousto-optic switch (AOS) used for active wavelength routing,2 the prominent cross talk mechanisms, identified in Fig. 1, consist of sidelobe coupling of nonresonant channels and incomplete polarization transformation for even slightly misaligned wavelength channels, both of which result in some intensity of the wrong channel being directed to the wrong fiber port. Both of these difficulties are resolved by techniques of passband engineering—modifying the classical sine-squared polarization-conversion optical-transmission function by changing the amplitude and phase of the acousto-optic interaction along the length of the filter.
© 1995 Optical Society of America
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