Quasi-Light Storage: A Method for the Tunable Storage of Optical Packets With a Potential Delay-Bandwidth Product of Several Thousand Bits

We investigate and discuss the possibilities and limits of a method for the tunable storage of optical packets called Quasi-Light Storage (QLS). The QLS is simply based on a sampling in the frequency domain. Hence, it is independent of the data rate, the modulation and the wavelength of the optical packets. It works at room temperatures in standard fibers with off-the-shelf telecom equipment. As we will show in theory, the method has the potential to store packets with several thousand Bits of data from Zero to up to 100 ns. In the experiments we have stored several 8 Bit packets with a data rate of 1 Gbps for up to 100 ns, which corresponds to a delay-bandwidth product of 100 Bit.