Near-Noiseless Receiver Agnostic Phase-Sensitive Pre-amplifier Based on PPLN Waveguides for High Speed Optical Near-Earth/Near-Lunar Satellite Networks

A practical, receiver agnostic near-noiseless phase-sensitive amplifier (PSA) with noise figure (NF) of (and less than) 1 dB based on periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide is proposed for ultra-high receiver sensitivity optical near-Earth/near-Lunar networks with data rates of 10 Gbps and beyond.

To harness the high-speed telecom receiver technology for FSOC applications, an ultra-low noise optical pre-amplifier with NF of significantly smaller than 3 dB is needed. It has been recognized that PSA can be used to realize a noise-free optical amplification. The PPLN waveguide – based PSA (PPLN-PSA) has several advantages compared to the highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF) – based PSA (HNLF-PSA). First, the PPLN-PSA is not subject to the detrimental effect of the stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) which limits the pump signal power and the corresponding PSA gain. Second, the PPLN-PSA has low parametric crosstalk and no intrinsic chirp. And third, the PPLN-PSA is a better fit for the SWAP (size, weight, and power) requirements as it uses compact, ~10 mm long, integrated photonic PPLN waveguides and it requires less pump power for the same gain. Therefore, space terminal receivers with 1 photon per bit receiver sensitivity operating at 10 Gbps data rate become feasible.

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