Four-wave mixing in microstructure fiber

We report what we believe to be the first experimental demonstration of nondegenerate four-wave mixing in a microstructure fiber. The effect of the chi ((3)) nonlinearity is enhanced in such a fiber because of the small core area, and we achieve phase matching by operating near the zero-dispersion wavelength (similar or equal to 750 nm). We have observed parametric gains of more than 13 dB in 6.1-m-long fiber with a pump peak power of only 6 W. We compare our experimental gain results with those predicted by theory and explore the effects of Raman shift and (or) amplification and cascaded nonlinear mixing. (C) 2001 Optical Society of America.