All-fiber parametric oscillator for soliton generation and rep-rate multiplication

Summary form only given. We show that four-photon mixing is a powerful tool to perform all-optical active mode-locking. This exploits the power of a cw pump to efficiently convert externally injected weak signals (either streams of bits or regular trains). We also show that the incoming signal repetition rate or a multiple of it can be easily generated in the active loop by simply adjusting the detuning between injected rep-rate and the corresponding harmonics of the active loop. By means of this method we multiplied by a factor of three the incoming rep-rate of 15 GHz, and we observed that the multiplicative process leads to a lack of fixed phase relationship between adjacent solitons.