Optical clock recovery from a data stream of an arbitrary bit rate by use of stimulated Brillouin scattering

Using a fiber-optic stimulated-Brillouin-scattering amplifier as an active filter, we have demonstrated optical clock recovery from 5-Gbit/s return-to-zero-format optical data. Definite patterns and pseudorandom bit sequences were tested. This scheme requires no prior knowledge of the clock frequency and is well suited for operation at higher data rates.