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Coherent terabit communications with microresonator Kerr frequency combs

Abstract

Optical frequency combs have the potential to revolutionize terabit communications1. The generation of Kerr combs in nonlinear microresonators2 is particularly promising3, enabling line spacings of tens of gigahertz. However, such combs may exhibit strong phase noise4,5,6, which has made high-speed data transmission impossible up to now. Here, we demonstrate that systematic adjustment of the pump conditions for low phase noise4,7,8,9 enables coherent data transmission with advanced modulation formats that pose stringent requirements on the spectral purity of the comb. In a first experiment, we encode a data stream of 392 Gbit s−1 on a Kerr comb using quadrature phase-shift keying and 16-state quadrature amplitude modulation. A second experiment demonstrates feedback stabilization of the comb and transmission of a 1.44 Tbit s–1 data stream over up to 300 km. The results show that Kerr combs meet the highly demanding requirements of coherent communications and thus offer an attractive route towards chip-scale terabit-per-second transceivers.

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Figure 1: Principles of coherent terabit-per-second communications with Kerr frequency combs.
Figure 2: Comb generation set-up.
Figure 3: Coherent data transmission using a Kerr microresonator frequency comb.
Figure 4: Coherent terabit-per-second data transmission using a feedback-stabilized Kerr frequency comb.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC starting grant ‘EnTeraPIC’, no. 280145), the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation, the Helmholtz International Research School for Teratronics (HIRST), the EU-FP7 project BigPipes, the Initiative and Networking Fund of the Helmholtz Association, the Center for Functional Nanostructures (CFN) of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) (project A 4.8), the DFG Major Research Instrumentation Programme, the Karlsruhe Nano-Micro Facility (KNMF), the Karlsruhe School of Optics & Photonics (KSOP), the Swiss National Science Foundation (NCCR Nano-Tera, NTF MCOMB), the Marie Curie IAPP Action, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) via the QuASAR programme and the European Space Agency (ESA) via a doctoral fellowship (to V.B.). Samples were fabricated at the EPFL Center for Micro- and Nanotechnology (CMi).

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Contributions

J.P. conceived and performed the data transmission experiments and analysed the data. V.B. and K.H. conceived, designed and fabricated the devices, which were characterized jointly by V.B. and T.H. M.L., Y.Y., D.W., P.S. and C.W. performed the data transmission experiments and analysed the data. The feedback stabilization of the comb source for the second experiment was implemented jointly by J.P. and Y.Y. J.Li, D.H. and R.S. contributed subsystems to the data transmission experiments. The project was supervised by R.H., W.F., J.L., T.J.K. and C.K. T.J.K. conceived and supervised the comb generation scheme and fabrication of the devices, C.K. conceived the data transmission and comb stabilization schemes and supervised the experiments. All authors discussed the data and wrote the manuscript jointly.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Tobias J. Kippenberg or Christian Koos.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Pfeifle, J., Brasch, V., Lauermann, M. et al. Coherent terabit communications with microresonator Kerr frequency combs. Nature Photon 8, 375–380 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2014.57

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