Spectral analysis of pulse-width jitter of optical pulse trains

摘要

We propose a technique for measuring the pulse width jitter of high repetition rate optical pulse trains. The technique is based on spectral measurement of three different harmonics of the detected pulse train. The simulation results show that the pulse width jitter would contribute a great amount of noise power to the total noise power when the product of pulse width and angular frequency is larger than 1. We apply the proposed technique to characterize noise of a Fabry-Perot Laser Diode. The pulse width jitter is estimated to be 2.3ps. Compared with the calculated 1.8% amplitude noise and 5.1ps timing jitter, the pulse width jitter is found not to be negligible.