Multi-heterodyne mixing of frequency stabilized combs for ultrafast coherent signal processing

摘要

Fast and precise measurements of ultrafast optical waveforms are essential to the development of optical coherent signal processing. In this paper, multi-heterodyne mixing of stabilized optical frequency combs is presented as a simple technique for the measurement of ultrafast laser pulses and exotic arbitrary optical waveforms. This technique takes advantage of both the broadband nature of the frequency comb and the narrow line-width of the individual comb-lines to produce an array of radio-frequency beat-notes that share the characteristics of the optical spectrum. Measurements of comb characteristics across THz of bandwidth are enabled by this method, while maintaining the accuracy at the level of the individual comb-line width. Results show that both frequency modulation and amplitude modulation combs can be measured using this scheme.