Four-wave mixing of spectrum-sliced fiber amplifier light source in a dispersion-shifted fiber

Four-wave mixing (FWM) is one of the most important nonlinear processes that may limit the capacity of wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) systems. The impact of the FWM in a system using coherent light sources such as lasers has been studied extensively. Recently, we proposed a spectrum-sliced fiber amplifier light source for the use in WDM systems. Unlike the laser sources, these potentially inexpensive WDM sources are incoherent and broadband. In this paper, we report the FWM of incoherent light sources, to our knowledge, for the first time. The results are compared with coherent laser sources