Tb/s all-optical nonlinear switching using SOA based Mach-Zehnder interferometer

A new method for increasing the speed of all-optical mach-zehnder interferometric (mzi) switching with a bulk semiconductor optical amplifier (soa), using chirped control signals, is suggested and theoretically analyzed. for 125fs input and chirped control pulses, we show acceleration of the gain recovery process using the cross phase modulation (xpm) effect. our method depicts that tb/s switching speeds, using bulk soa-mzi with a proper q-factor, is feasible. for the first time, we reach operation capability at 2tb/s with a q-factor of more than 10. the new scheme also improves the extinction and amplitude ratio of the output power, as well as increasing the contrast ratio of the switched signal. we use a finite difference beam propagation method for mzi analysis, taking into account all nonlinear effects of soa, such as group velocity dispersion (gvd), kerr effect, two photon absorption (tpa), carrier heating (ch) and spectral hole burning (shb).