Nonlinear optical fiber based high resolution all-optical waveform sampling

When there is a need to accurately characterize optical waveforms and, it is not surprising that some of the best, albeit only recently established, techniques to do this rely on all-optical phenomena. Some basic reasons why all-optical sampling holds great promise as a very useful tool well into the foreseeable future are that there are no ringing phenomena with associated waveform distortion as in electronic sampling due to impedance mismatch, and that the time resolution can be made extremely high (<< 1 ps) while yet also offering high sensitivity for e.g. eye diagram (a superposition of all '1' and '0' in a data sequence that is widely used in telecommunications testing) and statistical analysis. In this paper, we review recent developments in optical fiber-based sampling of optical waveforms. In particular, we describe the state-of-the-art in terms of the various performance measures as well as their trade-offs.