D. Cotter

TL;DR: Recent advances in developing nonlinear optical techniques for processing serial digital information at high speed are reviewed and expected to become important in future high-capacity communications networks.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors review the recent progress of information theory in optical communications and describe the current experimental results and associated advances in various individual technologies which increase the information capacity, and confirm the widely held belief that the reported capacities are approaching the fundamental limits imposed by signal-to-noise ratio and the distributed nonlinearity of conventional optical fibres, resulting in the reduction in the growth rate of communication capacity.

TL;DR: The authors report the first demonstration of all-optical header recognition and self-routing of ultrafast packets with multibit addresses and a single optical AND gate recognises 6 bit ‘keyword’ codes, allowing self- routing of 100 Gbit/s packets.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that gain recovery times of approximately 10 ps are achievable in semiconductor laser amplifiers using an optical beam to speed the gain recovery rate, which should permit high data rate (up to 100 Gbit/s) all optical signal processing applications (e.g., demultiplexing, clock recovery).

TL;DR: In this article, it was shown that interferometers containing quantum-dot semiconductor optical amplifiers can be effective for ultrafast cross-phase modulation and digital signal processing with low dependence on the specific random data pattern.