Patent ID: 7053996

Claim:
An apparatus for adaptive optical communications, comprising: a compensator which receives an arbitrarily polarized optical pulse over an optical transmission line to modify characteristics of the optical pulse; at least one spectrogram measurement device coupled to the compensator for measuring the optical pulse, the spectrogram measurement device further comprising, an optical device which accepts the received optical pulse and a gate pulse, wherein the optical device transmittance is modified by two-photon absorption and four wave mixing, and further wherein the optical device produces an output probe pulse, a polarization-independent angle dispersion device optically coupled to the optical device, which performs spectral analysis on the output probe pulse, and an analysis device associated with the optical device which measures time-gated intensity and phase for the spectrally transformed output probe pulse to produce spectrogram information; and a control unit which receives the spectrogram information from the spectrogram measurement device and provides feedback to the compensator based upon the information to improve the optical pulse's characteristics.