On the beating of ASE and XPM noise in optical receivers

Presents a theoretical study on the effects of beating between amplified spontaneous emission (ASE) noise and cross-phase modulation (XPM)-induced noise in optical receivers. Our theory of ASE-XPM beat noise predicts that such beating effects are actually beneficial to receiver performance, resulting in lower error probabilities. The ASE-XPM beat noise produces skewed non-Gaussian probability distributions and shifts optimum receiver threshold closer to the one level. These conclusions are insensitive to the exact noise statistics assumed for XPM or ASE.