Fiber nonlinearity compensation for OFDM super-channels using optical phase conjugation

We experimentally demonstrate that mid-link optical phase conjugation (OPC) effectively compensates fiber nonlinearity in coherent optical OFDM super-channels. The OPC was produced by pump × subcarrier degenerate four-wave-mixing in a 1-km highly nonlinear fiber. The nonlinear threshold for the 10 × 80-km 604.7-Gb/s 16-QAM test system was increased by 4.8 dB. The performance at the optimum power was only improved by 0.2 dB because the OPC module produces a 1.6 dB penalty for the back-to-back system. FWM theory shows that the 'noise' processes of OPC modules utilizing χ3 nonlinearities could be reduced by increasing the pump power, which will improve back-to-back performance with the OPC module.