Suppression of intrachannel four-wave-mixing-induced ghost pulses in high-speed transmissions by phase inversion between adjacent marker blocks

We propose a method for suppressing the intensity of the worst ghost pulse (a single ghost pulse between two long marker blocks) resulting from intrachannel four-wave mixing (FWM) in strongly dispersion-managed on-off keying optical transmissions 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 40-Gbit/s transmission experiment over a 100-km non-zero-dispersion-shifted fiber. The proposed method may extend the reach of high-bit-rate optical transmission systems in which intrachannel FWM is the dominating nonlinear penalty. (C) 2002 Optical Society of America.