High-resolution microwave frequency dissemination on an 86-km urban optical link

摘要

We report the first demonstration of a long-distance ultra-stable frequency dissemination in the microwave range. A 9.15-GHz signal is transferred through an 86-km urban optical link with a fractional frequency instability of 1.3×10−15 at 1-s integration time and below 10−18 at one day. The optical link phase noise compensation is performed with a round-trip method. To achieve such a result we implement light polarisation scrambling and dispersion compensation. This link outperforms all the previous radio-frequency links and compares well with recently demonstrated full optical links.