After what seems (to me) to have been several eons worth of experimenting, writing, re-writing, re-experimenting, more re-writing and then some more re-writing (all of which mostly by others), the all-optical FFT idea that was used at the IPQ department at KIT finally made it into Nature Photonics. When I got there in late ’09, work on the manuscript was already in progress – back then it was only 10Tbit/s instead of the now published 26. Shortly before I left at the end of 2010, feedback from the reviewers was asking for repeating the experiments with better comparable metrics (we had used the error vector magnitude, they wanted true bit error rate). I didn’t stay to see the new experiments, but it being a year later they cranked up the volume to 26Tbit/s – originally this was intended as an OFC 2011 post-deadline submission, but was rejected. So that made its way into Nature then.
Honestly, I didn’t do a whole lot of work on this, I guess my contributions were more of the background type. So there I am in the middle of the 30+ authors list. Kinda reminds me of this PhD comics strip.
For more information on the publication itself see this page.