Relation between vestigial-sideband filtering and pi/2 progressive phase shift.
We show that a Gaussian-shaped vestigial-sideband (VSB) return-to-zero (RZ) on-off-keying (OOK) optical signal is essentially a RZ OOK signal with pi/2 progressive phase shift. The reduced intersymbol interference of the VSB signal can be explained as a destructive interference effect. We experimentally demonstrate a method for generating an effective 40-Gbit/s VSB signal without relying on the detuning of an optical filter.