All-Optical Quantization Scheme Based on Fiber Nonlinearity

We have proposed a novel all-optical quantization scheme that may be useful for analog-to-digital conversion. The preprocess of optical sampling is performed by four-wave mixing, and optical quantizing is realized by soliton phenomena. We have conducted a simple proof-of-principle experiment, and demonstrated the optical multilevel thresholding to show the feasibility of the proposed method.