Comprehensive research on self phase modulation based optical delay systems

This paper comprehensively investigates the properties of self phase modulation based optical delay systems consisting of dispersion compensation fibre and highly nonlinear fibres. It researches into the impacts of power level launched into highly nonlinear fibres, conversion wavelength, dispersion slope, modulation format and optical filter bandwidth on the overall performance of optical delay systems. The results reveal that, if the power launched into highly nonlinear fibres is fixed, the time delay generally varies linearly with the conversion wavelength, but jumps intermittently at some conversion wavelengths. However, the time delay varies semi-periodically with the power launched into highly nonlinear fibres. The dispersion slope of highly nonlinear fibres has significant influence on the time delay, especially for the negative dispersion slope. The time delay differs with modulation formats due to the different combined interaction of nonlinearity and dispersion in fibres. The bandwidth of the optical filters also greatly affects the time delay because it determines the bandwidth of the passed signal in the self phase modulation based time delay systems. The output signal quality of the overall time delay systems depends on the conversion wavelength and input power level. The optimisation of the power level and conversion wavelength to provide the best output signal quality is made at the end of this paper.