Suppression of Intra-Channel Four-Wave-Mixing Induced Ghost Pulses in High-Speed Transmissions by Phase Inversion between Adjacent Marker Blocks

We propose a new method to suppress the intensity of the worst ghost pulse r (a single ghost pulse between two long marker blocks) resulting from intrachannel four-wave-mixing (FWM) in strongly dispersion managed on-off-keying (OOK) optical transmission by inverting the optical phases of the marker blocks surrounding the ghost pulse. We show both analytically and numerically that the method provides substantial suppression of the maximum ghost pulse energy. The suppression is experimentally verified in a 40 Gbit/s transmission experiment over a 100-km non-zero-dispersion-shifted fiber link. The proposed method should significantly extend the reach of high-bit-rate optical transmission systems in which intrachannel FWM is the dominating nonlinear penalty.