Investigation of Four-Wave-Mixing Crosstalk in Phase-Sensitive Fiber Optical Parametric Amplifier

Four-wave-mixing (FWM) crosstalk in frequency nondegenerate phase-sensitive fiber optical parametric amplifiers (FOPAs) applied for wavelength-division-multiplexed (WDM) signals is investigated experimentally and theoretically. We analyze significant FWM interactions that can generate crosstalk components in the signal band. Approximate expressions are developed for the FWM crosstalk to conveniently estimate how it scales with the system parameters. The analytical results agree well with the experimental results and simulations. The results show that the FWM crosstalk grows dramatically with the increase of the system parameters, including input signal power per channel, signal gain, the length of nonlinear fiber, and signal channel number. We also compare the FWM crosstalk in the phase-sensitive FOPA and the phase-insensitive FOPA experimentally and explain the difference of their crosstalk behaviors through theoretical analysis and simulations. The results show that, due to the presence of idlers at the input, the phase-sensitive FOPA produces higher crosstalk than the phase-insensitive FOPA even when they have equivalent signal gains. It indicates that the crosstalk in the phase-sensitive FOPA is more detrimental so that careful design of the amplifier to suppress the impact of the FWM crosstalk is necessary. The analytical solutions obtained in this paper are useful in the design of PS-FOPAs for amplifying WDM signals.