Mitigation of nonlinear distortion in hybrid Raman/phase-sensitive amplifier links.

Hybrid systems combining distributed Raman amplification and phase-sensitive amplifiers (PSAs) are investigated in numerical simulations. We focus on the mitigation of fiber nonlinearities and the impact of the span power map which is also important in systems employing optical phase conjugation or phase-conjugated twin waves. We simulate multi-span PSA links with and without distributed Raman amplification and show that by including distributed Raman amplification, the transmission distance increases more at optimum launch power than in the linear regime. For a 5-channel WDM QPSK PSA-amplified system, we observe a transmission reach increase by a factor of 8.1 by including ideal distributed Raman amplification.