SOLITON LOGIC GATE USING LOW-BIREFRINGENCE FIBER IN A NONLINEAR LOOP MIRROR

We demonstrate, using numerical simulations, a new all-optical logic g ate that combines the mechanisms of soliton dragging and nonlinear-opt ical loop mirrors (NOLM's). The design uses specially wrapped low-bire fringence polarization-maintaining fiber, which we recently demonstrat ed in the NOLM configuration. Combining the soliton dragging and NOLM effects increases the timing window of the gate, and using the low-bir efringence fiber minimizes the number of cross splices required. For e xample, we show that by using only one cross splice we can achieve a s witching energy of 5.3 pJ and a total timing window of 3.3 pulse width s. We also present a set of design rules for our low-birefringence NOL M. (C) 1995 Optical Society of America