Experiments in Ultrahigh-speed Optical Modulation and Transmission Using Plasmonic Mach-Zehnder Modulator

We summarize our experiments with an ultrabroad bandwidth plasmonic Mach-Zehnder modulator (MZM) in an intensity modulation and direct detection (IM/DD) system for short-reach optical transmission up to 10 km. We demonstrate the capabilities of plasmonic MZM in terms of high-symbol-rate multi-level optical signal modulation with two different signaling schemes: m-level pulse amplitude modulation (PAM-m), m=8, and partial-response-encoded binary (polybinary) modulation with memory length n, n=4. By mapping the performance to a family of soft-decision (SD) tail-biting SC-LDPC forward error correction (FEC) codes, a net bitrate of 367.68 Gbit/s can be achieved with PAM 8 signaling and 279.62 Gbit/s with tetrabinary signaling after 10 km standard single-mode fiber. Using hard-decision (HD) staircase FEC codes, a net bitrate of 320.70 Gbit/s is obtained with PAM-8 and 277.97 Gbit/s with tetrabinary.