A novel interferometric wavelength converter

The fiber Kerr effect employment in a wavelength conversion version, owing to low silica nonlinearity, has been prevented by the lack of an efficient interferometric architecture. A novel all-fiber wavelength converter is presented and characterized. The proposed scheme while taking advantage of the Kerr effect properties in standard communication optical fiber overcomes classical interferometric structure limitations, such as high environmental sensitivity and difficult operating management. A comparison with these architectures is discussed. Operation up to 3 Gb/s is demonstrated in the whole third communication window.