Enhanced Carrier to Noise Ratio by Brillouin Amplification for Optical Communications

The limits of narrowband Brillouin gain for improving the carrier to noise ratio (CNR) of spectral lines is evaluated for 64-QAM communications. Calculations of the change in CNR for practical gain, noise, and bandwidth parameters indicate the maximum obtainable CNR enhancement factor and output CNR as being ≈25 dB and ≈40~43 dB/0.1 nm, respectively, limited by the narrowness of the Brillouin gain bandwidth and Brillouin amplifier noise, respectively. These limits determined from the relative power suppression of out of band noise contained within a 10 GHz channel bandwidth are relevant to spectral line amplification either before data modulation at the transmitter, or for a local oscillator (LO) at the receiver for coherent detection. A calibration measurement of the bit error rate (BER) of a 48 Gb/s 64-QAM signal versus CNR of a LO loaded with ASE noise is used to extrapolate the BER from the calculated CNR for Brillouin gain. The results predict the BER being minimally degraded for an input CNR of ≈>20 dB/0.1 nm and falling below the hard decision FEC limit for an input CNR as low as ≈0 dB/0.1 nm. The estimates are found consistent with 64QAM signal experiments of pilot tone carrier recovery by Brillouin gain for both single channel and WDM cases. The insight aids the design and estimation of achievable performance improvement for applying Brillouin amplifiers to coherent communications.