Phase regeneration of a star-8QAM signal in a phase-sensitive amplifier with conjugated pumps

We demonstrate numerically phase regeneration of a star8QAM signal with two amplitude and four phase states in a phase-sensitive amplifier. In a dual-stage setup, two phase-conjugated idlers are generated in a first stage consisting of two fiber-optic parametric phase-insensitive amplifiers operated in highly nonlinear gain regime. These are used as pumps in the second, phase-sensitive amplification stage which enables efficient phase regeneration via a degenerate four-wave-mixing process. The latter can be operated in two different operation modes: without format conversion or with phase-shifted amplitude levels. In both regimes, we observe high phase-regeneration efficiency for all amplitude levels: the initial phase noise with 0.2 rad standard deviation is reduced by a factor of 5. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America