Experimental demonstration of optical phase conjugation using counter-propagating dual pumped four-wave mixing in semiconductor optical amplifier

We report optical phase conjugation in C-band by counter-propagating dual pumped non-degenerate four-wave mixing in a semiconductor optical amplifier (SOA). The co-propagating signal and pump waves create a grating inside SOA which diffracts counter-propagating pump and generates the conjugate wave. Since the signal and conjugate waves appear at opposite ends, the conjugate is easily filtered out from the rest of spectrum with minimal spectral shift of the conjugate with respect to the incoming signal. With pump powers of −3.2 dBm each and signal input power of −7 dBm, conjugate power was of −27.2 dBm, giving a conversion efficiency of 1% at 18 GHz pump-signal detuning. By modulating the signal by a periodic pattern '1000' at 10 Gbps using a non-zero chirp intensity modulator and resolving the temporal profile of the electric field envelope of the conjugate wave, we demonstrate spectral inversion.