Abstract

In ultrahigh-speed optical communication networks, time-to-space conversion, which maps the serial time-domain ultrafast optical signal into its spatial replica, is important both for demultiplexing and to enable spatial or parallel processing for various higher-layer functionalities, such as header recognition and data encryption [1]. Time-to-space conversion is also interesting as a new approach for ultrafast optical waveform measurement. Several groups have reported recently on time-to-space converters [1-4]. From the viewpoint of applications for real-world optical communication networks, however, several requirements will have to be fulfilled simultaneously. For example, the operating wavelength must fall within the 1.55 µm lightwave communications band, the response time of the nonlinear medium must be fast, the efficiency must be high, and the temporal processing window must be large enough to accommodate parallel processing of many optical bits. In this paper we report the first spectral nonlinear optics time-to-space converter operating in the lightwave band. The use of second harmonic generation (SHG) as the spectral nonlinear optical process [1,3,5] provides ultrafast response. Furthermore, drawing on our analysis of the conversion efficiency of a SHG time-to-space converter [5], we have optimized the sensitivity of our converter to realize the first direct, single-shot measurements of a single laser pulse with no averaging.

© 2002 Optical Society of America