Suppression of intrachannel nonlinear effects with alternate-polarization formats

We investigate using alternate-polarization (APol) on-off keying formats, in which adjacent bits have orthogonal states of polarization, to suppress intrachannel nonlinear impairments in dispersion-managed (DM) optical fiber transmission systems. Simple methods to generate the APol formats are discussed, and the transmission performance of the APol formats for both 40-Gb/s DM systems and 10-Gb/s DM-soliton systems is experimentally studied. We show that the APol formats can significantly improve the performance of 40-Gb/s DM transmission systems, while the improvement of 10-Gb/s systems is smaller.