All-optical pulse reshaping and retiming systems incorporating pulse shaping fiber Bragg grating

This paper demonstrates two optical pulse retiming and reshaping systems incorporating superstructured fiber Bragg gratings (SSFBGs) as pulse shaping elements. A rectangular switching window is implemented to avoid conversion of the timing jitter on the original data pulses into pulse amplitude noise at the output of a nonlinear optical switch. In a first configuration, the rectangular pulse generator is used at the (low power) data input to a nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) to perform retiming of an incident noisy data signal using a clean local clock signal to control the switch. In a second configuration, the authors further amplify the data signal and use it to switch a (low power) clean local clock signal. The S-shaped nonlinear characteristic of the NOLM results in this instance in a reduction of both timing and amplitude jitter on the data signal. The underlying technologies required for the implementation of this technique are such that an upgrade of the scheme for the regeneration of ultrahigh bit rate signals at data rates in excess of 320 Gb/s should be achievable

Gravitational instantons, self-duality and geometric flows

We discuss four-dimensional "spatially homogeneous" gravitational instantons. These are self-dual solutions of Euclidean vacuum Einstein's equations with potentially non-vanishing cosmological constant. They are endowed with a product structure R \times M_3 leading to a natural foliation into three-dimensional subspaces evolving in Euclidean time. For a large class of three-dimensional subspaces, the dynamics coincides with the geometric flow on the three-dimensional homogeneous slice, driven by the Ricci tensor plus an so(3) gauge connection. The metric on the three-dimensional space is related to the vielbein of the three-dimensional subspace, while the gauge field is inherited from the anti-self-dual component of the four-dimensional Levi--Civita connection.Comment: 14 page

A reconfigurable optical header recognition system for optical packet routing applications

We demonstrate a reconfigurable all-optical packet processing system. The key device is a code-reconfigurable header decoder based on a fiber Bragg grating. The performance of the system is tested for different packet headers, and error-free operation is confirmed

Rapidly reconfigurable optical phase encoder-decoders based on fiber Bragg gratings

We demonstrate the capacity for fast dynamic reconfiguration of optical code-division multiple access (OCDMA) phase en/decoders based on fiber Bragg gratings and a thermal phase-tuning technique. The tuning time between two different phase codes is measured to be less than 2 s. An OCDMA system using tunable-phase decoders is compared with a system using fixed-phase decoders and, although the system using fixed-phase decoders exhibits a shorter output autocorrelation pulsewidth and lower sidelobes, the system using tunable-phase decoders has advantages of flexibility and a more relaxed requirement on the input pulsewidth

Editorial

We use a linear FROG technique based on electro-optic modulation to fully characterise for the first time pulses from a 1.06 µm FP laser diode and design a grating to provide optimum pulse compression

Some comments on Anti-de Sitter D-branes

We present some preliminary investigations about the AdS2*S2 D3-branes in AdS3*S3. We analyse the quadratic fluctuations of Dirac-Born-Infeld action around a given semi-classical D-brane configuration and compare them with results obtained by using conformal field theory techniques. We finally study classical motions of open strings attached to those D-branes and analyse the role of the spectral flow in this context.Comment: 12 pages, no figure

All-optical 160 Gbit/s RZ data retiming system incorporating a pulse shaping fibre Bragg grating

We characterize a 160Gbit/s retimer based on flat-topped pulses shaped using a superstructured fibre Bragg grating. The benefits of using shaped rather than conventional pulse forms in terms of timing jitter reduction are confirmed by bit-error-rate measurements

R^2 Corrections and Non-perturbative Dualities of N=4 String ground states

We compute and analyse a variety of four-derivative gravitational terms in the effective action of six- and four-dimensional type II string ground states with N=4 supersymmetry. In six dimensions, we compute the relevant perturbative corrections for the type II string compactified on K3. In four dimensions we do analogous computations for several models with (4,0) and (2,2) supersymmetry. Such ground states are related by heterotic-type II duality or type II-type II U-duality. Perturbative computations in one member of a dual pair give a non-perturbative result in the other member. In particular, the exact CP-even R^2 coupling on the (2,2) side reproduces the tree-level term plus NS 5-brane instanton contributions on the (4,0) side. On the other hand, the exact CP-odd coupling yields the one-loop axionic interaction a.R\wedge R together with a similar instanton sum. In a subset of models, the expected breaking of the SL(2,Z)_S S-duality symmetry to a \Gamma(2)_S subgroup is observed on the non-perturbative thresholds. Moreover, we present a duality chain that provides evidence for the existence of heterotic N=4 models in which N=8 supersymmetry appears at strong coupling.Comment: Latex2e, 51 pages, 1 figur

G3-homogeneous gravitational instantons

We provide an exhaustive classification of self-dual four-dimensional gravitational instantons foliated with three-dimensional homogeneous spaces, i.e. homogeneous self-dual metrics on four-dimensional Euclidean spaces admitting a Bianchi simply transitive isometry group. The classification pattern is based on the algebra homomorphisms relating the Bianchi group and the duality group SO(3). New and general solutions are found for Bianchi III.Comment: 24 pages, few correction