A novel scheme to generate dark-RZ pulse and study on its transmission performance

We have proposed and experimentally demonstrated a novel and simple configuration to generate a dark-RZ pulse by a Mach-Zehnder delayed line interferometer. We have also compared the transmission performance between the dark-RZ and bright-RZ pulse in the pre-dispersion compensation and post-dispersion compensation systems. Our experimental results have shown that the dark-RZ is more sensitivity to nonlinear effects than the bright-RZ pulse, and the power penalty will also be larger than that of the bright-RZ at the same BER. The experiment results have also shown that the dark-RZ pulse is not suitable for the signal transmission with pre-dispersion compensation.