Optical Pulse Synthesis using Brillouin Selective Sideband Amplification

摘要

Optical pulse generation using Fourier synthesis is attractive for a number of applications, including photonic A/D conversion, electro-optic sampling, and time-resolved spectroscopy, because the bandwidth, shape, and repetition rate of the pulses can be easily controlled. Previously reported optical pulse synthesis involved locking several CW lasers together,either with a linear phase-locking scheme [1] or with some other nonlinear phase-locking schemes [2,3]. In this paper, we report a simple scheme that uses Brillouin selective sideband amplification (BSSA))[4,5] to generate necessary frequency bands which are automatically phase-locked together. Other advantages of this scheme include built-in optical amplification, simple electronic control, polarization insensitivity, and direct conversion of low phase noise RF signal into low jitter optical pulses.