Polarization-independent ASE four-wave mixing in a fast semiconductor optical amplifier

This work describes a polarization-insensitive four-wave mixing undertaken with a fast semiconductor optical amplifier that acted as a nonlinear medium. The pump output was composed of coherent light, while the probe element received incoherent amplified spontaneously emitted light that had been spectrally-sliced via an ultra-narrow band fiber Bragg grating filter. An analytical model was utilized to evaluate the speed of the semiconductor optical amplifier via extracted nonlinear parameters that were relevant to the experimental results.