UWB doublet generation in an integrated semiconductor optical amplifier Mach-Zehnder interferometer

In this paper, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel technique to generate ultrawideband (UWB) doublet pulses by exploiting the cross-phase modulation (XPM) in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). The key component in the proposed system consists on an integrated SOA Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) pumped with a Gaussian pulse modulated optical carrier. The transfer function of the nonlinear conversion process leads to the generation of UWB doublet pulses through the control of the biasing point of the SOA-MZI.