Polarisation-Insensitive Fibre Optic Parametric Amplifiers For Applications In Modern Communication Networks

We evaluate and compare performance of three polarisation-insensitive fibre optic parametric amplifier (PI-FOPA) variants. We employ each variant to amplify a set of 21x50 GHz-spaced channels by 12.8 +/- 1.5 dB and analyse bit-error rate of an amplified 100G PDM-QPSK channel as power per channel is varied. We demonstrate two variants to provide a competitive noise figure of 6 dB. We envisage each of three PI-FOPA variants to be employed for broadband communications, phase-sensitive amplification and extended-reach PON respectively.