All-optical wavelength multicasting exploiting cross-phase modulation in a dispersion-flattened nonlinear photonic crystal fiber

An all-optical wavelength multicasting scheme with tunable output wavelength and channel numbers has been proposed and demonstrated based on cross-phase modulation (XPM) in a dispersion-flattened highly nonlinear photonic crystal fiber. We show that the input signal wavelength can be simultaneously converted to four different wavelengths by filtering the broadened sideband of the continuous-wave (CW) probe beams. The experiments are carried out to investigate into the wavelength tunability, and exploit the dynamic characteristics with variable input signal powers, the ability of multicasting channels scalable, and the relationship between the multicasting signal qualities with variable optical band-pass filter (OBPF) bandwidth. The results indicate that the proposed wavelength multicasting scheme has the advantages of simple structure, efficient operation in a wide wavelength range, as well as transparent to bit rates. Moreover, the system can be upgraded to generate more multicasting channels by increasing the number of CW probe beams.