Experimental Demonstration of Optical Retiming Using Temporal Soliton Molecules

We experimentally demonstrate optical retiming of a 10.7 Gb/s data stream utilizing the property of bound soliton pairs (or “soliton molecules”) to relax to an equilibrium temporal separation after propagation through a nonlinear dispersion alternating fiber span. Pulses offset up to 16 ps from bit center are successfully retimed. The results of the experiment are in agreement with numerical simulations. An enhanced version of this retiming scheme is analyzed using numerical simulations.