260-GBaud Single-Wavelength Coherent Transmission Over 100-km SSMF Based on Novel Arbitrary Waveform Generator and Thin-Film Niobate I/Q Modulator

In this paper, we demonstrate up to 260-GBaud single-wavelength coherent transmission by employing an optical transmitter based on two wide-bandwidth devices: a novel 260-GS/s arbitrary waveform generator with a 10-dB bandwidth of 90-GHz and a thin-film Lithium Niobate I/Q modulator with a 3-dB bandwidth of 110-GHz. We first assess the performance of our high symbol rate transmitter for generating spectrally efficient Nyquist multilevel modulation format signals at symbol rates up to 210-GBaud with >1.4-Tbps achievable information rates and by using linear digital signal processing only. We achieve up to 1.84-Tbps at 185-GBaud using PCS-64QAM, highlighting the linear behavior of our transmitter for high symbol rate Nyquist signaling. We then switch to dual-polarization QPSK coherent transmission and further increase the symbol rate up to 260-GBaud. Without using nonlinear digital-signal-processing nor advanced inter-symbol-interference mitigation techniques, we successfully transmit 260-GBaud QPSK at 800-Gbps net rate over 100-km of standard single mode fiber.