Interferometric and Multiband optical Parametric Amplifiers for Communications (IMPAC)

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Telecommunications underpin many sectors of modern life and especially the growing digital economy. The rapid growth of the telecommunications transmission capacity along with the significant reduction of the cost per bit has enabled development of new technologies and business models which revolutionised everyday life. The telecommunications backbone is formed by fibre optic communications enabling transmission of vast amount of data between virtually any points on the Earth. Multiplication of the fibre optic communications transmission capacity in the past decades have been provided mostly by several technological breakthroughs, such as employment of Erbium-doped fibre amplifiers or coherent receivers. The next significant advancement providing a revolutionary shift in fibre optic communications could be employment of multi-band transmission utilising the whole bandwidth available in modern optical communication fibres. Multi-band optical communications have potential to five-fold the transmission capacity without need to deploy new transmission fibres thus significantly reducing the costs. However, the key challenge for employment of multi-band transmission is lack of suitable optical amplifiers able to operate in the wavelength bands of interest and across several bands simultaneously.This project, Interferometric and Multiband optical Parametric Amplifiers for Communications (IMPAC), will provide the key advances necessary for fibre optic parametric amplifiers (FOPA) to enable EDFA-equivalent signal amplification in all wavelength bands appealing for multi-band communications (O, E, S, C, L) and with bandwidth in excess of 100 nm, potentially up to 200 nm. In IMPAC I will:1. Create a fully autonomous and robust polarisation-insensitive (PI) FOPA with high net gain >20dB and low polarisation-dependent gain <0.5dB across a record wide bandwidth >100nm.2. Pioneer interferometric FOPAs rejecting unwanted FWM products to double available gain bandwidth or to 'eliminate' nonlinear crosstalk with suppression of ~20dB.3. Significantly (by a factor of 10) reduce the signal noise attributed to the stimulated Brillouin scattering mitigation, whilst allowing for a wide FOPA gain bandwidth of at least ~100nm.4. Pioneer a PI-FOPA with gain tuneable across O/E/S bands for signal and pump amplification, and consequently create the first-ever distributed PI-FOPA in SSMF.5. Devise the 'next generation' PI-FOPA combining the project achievements in terms of gain bandwidth, low noise figure, rejection of unwanted FWM and SBS mitigation to facilitate operation across a bandwidth up to 200nm with performance superior to commercial EDFAs.