Demonstration of tunable optical generation of higher-order modulation formats using nonlinearities and coherent frequency comb

We demonstrate a tunable, optical generation scheme of higher-order modulation formats including pulse amplitude modulation (PAM) and quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM). Using this method, 100.4 Gbit/s 16-QAM and 120 Gbit/s 64-QAM were generated from 50.2 and 40 Gbit/s QPSK signals at EVMs of 7.8% and 6.4%, and 60 Gbit/s 8-PAM were generated at an EVM of 8.1% using three 20-Gbit/s BPSK signals. We also demonstrated a successful transmission of 80 Gbit/s 16-QAM through 80 km SMF-28 after compensating with 20 km DCF. All signals were generated, transmitted, and detected with BER below the forward error correction threshold.