Influence of degenerate four-wave mixing on the performance of supercontinuum-based multiwavelength optical source

The influence of degenerate four-wave mixing (FWM) on the performance of supercontinuum-based multiwavelength optical source has been investigated in detail experimentally and theoretically. Numerical simulation results show that the degenerate FWM effect has a deteriorative influence on the spectral uniformity and the optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) of supercontinuum-based optical source, and by suppressing degenerate FWM effect the performance enhancement of the supercontinuum can be achieved successfully. These results are also confirmed by our experiments. Experimentally, by suppressing degenerate FWM the crosstalk of adjacent channels to the filtered channel can be reduced by as much as 15 dB, and consequently the measured receiver sensitivity at 10 Gbit/s for the filtered optical source is improved from -1.7 to -17.8 dBm.