Third-order optical nonlinearity in optical fibers has many attractive applications to all-optical signal processing that will be employed in future large-capacity photonic networks. After reviewing the third-order nonlinear optical property of optical fibers, we describe our recent experimental results on all-optical signal processing functions such as wideband wavelength conversion, ultrafast gate switching, and ultrafast pulse reshaping. These functions are based on self-phase modulation (SPM), cross-phase modulation (XPM), and four-wave mixing (FWM) in nonlinear fibers.
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