Optical Phase Quantizer Based on Phase Sensitive Four Wave Mixing at Low Nonlinear Phase Shifts

We propose and demonstrate a new phase-sensitive (PS) scheme based on four-wave mixing followed by a polarizer to achieve an ideal binary step-like phase transfer function at nonlinear phase shifts as low as 0.3 rad by significantly increasing the parametric deamplification component. PS operation is obtained by polarization mixing the phase-locked and orthogonally polarized signal and idler, which is generated in a degenerate dual-pump vector parametric amplifier.