Phase-Sensitive Amplified Transmission Links for Improved Sensitivity and Nonlinearity Tolerance

In this paper, we investigate the properties of transmission links amplified by phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSAs). Using an analytic description, we explain the principles enabling improved sensitivity compared to conventional links amplified by phase-insensitive amplifiers (PIAs) and mitigation of nonlinear transmission distortions. We demonstrate these features using numerical simulations, and in particular, we show the possibility of efficiently mitigating both self-phase modulation (SPM)-induced distortions and nonlinear phase noise (NLPN) if the link dispersion map is optimized. The properties of the noise on signal and idler are important and to enable NLPN mitigation, the noise must be correlated at the link input. We investigate the role of the dispersion map in detail and show that in a link with standard single mode fiber (SSMF) the optimum dispersion map for efficient nonlinearity mitigation corresponds to precompensation of an amount equal to the effective loss length. Furthermore, we experimentally demonstrate both improved sensitivity and mitigation of nonlinearities in a 105 km PSA-amplified link transmitting 10 GBd 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16QAM) data. We measure a combined effect allowing for more than 12 dB larger span loss in a PSA-amplified link compared to a conventional PIA-amplified link to reach the same bit error ratio (BER) of 1×10^-3.