Multichannel SBS Slow Light Using Spectrally Sliced Incoherent Pumping

We propose and experimentally demonstrate the use of an incoherent spectrally sliced amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) source as the pump for broadband stimulated Brillouin scattering-based slow light. Both 2.5-Gb/s on-off-keyed and differential-phase-shift-keyed signals are continuously delayed by as much as 170 ps, with less than 4-dB power penalty at 10^-9 bit error rate. A 2-GHz and a 4-GHz spectrally sliced pump are compared, emphasizing the need of optimizing the slow-light spectral-width according to the signal bandwidth. Furthermore, independent and simultaneous delay on multiple data channels with different modulation formats within a single slow-light medium is proposed and experimentally demonstrated by using a periodically spectrally sliced ASE source. Our approach might be useful in future heterogeneous multiformat, multibit-rate, and multichannel fiber-optic communication systems and networks.