20 Tbit/s Transmission Over 6860 km With Sub-Nyquist Channel Spacing

We demonstrate that channel spacing can be reduced to values smaller than the Nyquist channel spacing over transoceanic distance. Modulation memory induced by constrained transmitter bandwidth together with multisymbol detection can reduce intersymbol interference for systems with sub-Nyquist channel spacing. We transmit 198 × 100 G bandwidth constrained polarization-division-multiplexed return-to-zero quaternary phase shift keying channels with 400% spectral efficiency over 6860 km using 52 km spans of 150 μ m
²
fiber and simple single-stage erbium-doped fiber amplifiers without any Raman amplification. We also show that 100 G coherent nonlinear performance scales differently with distance on uncompensated dispersion maps compared with direct detection transmission.