Measurement of local zero-dispersion wavelength at the input-side of dispersion managed optical fibers

This paper proposes a method for measuring the local zero-dispersion wavelength at the input-side of dispersion-managed optical fibers. The method utilizes the interaction between nonlinear effects and the phase-modulation to amplitude-modulation (PM-AM) conversion due to group velocity dispersion (GVD). The interaction shifts the wavelength yielding the minimum amplitude-modulation, which is described analytically by using the adiabatic model of modulation instability (MI). An experiment in the laboratory agrees well with the theoretical values, and confirms the feasibility of this method. The local zero-dispersion wavelength of the effective lengths of actually installed cables is successfully measured by the proposed method.