Reduced timing jitter in dispersion-managed light- wave systems through parametric amplification

We show that the timing jitter in dispersion-managed light-wave systems can be reduced considerably by replacing the erbium-doped fiber amplifiers with parametric amplifiers in which four-wave mixing is used to generate a phase-conjugated signal. We derive analytic expressions for the timing jitter by using the moment method for both the soliton and the nonsoliton systems and show that in both cases parametric amplifiers reduce the timing jitter enough that a 160-Gbit/s system is not jitter limited to distances as large as 4000 km. We include the contribution to timing jitter from the frequency shifts induced by intrapulse Raman scattering because this contribution dominates at such high bit rates. The effects of third-order dispersion are also included in the theoretical analysis. © 2003 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: 060.0060, 060.2330, 060.2320, 060.5530, 060.4510.