2000 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.

IEEE Journal of Lightwave Technology
Volume 18 Number 1, January 2000

Coupled Optoelectronic Oscillators for Generating Both RF Signal and Optical Pulses

Page 73.

Abstract:

We present experimental results of coupled optoelectronic oscillators (COEO) constructed with a semiconductor optical amplifier-based ring laser and a semiconductor colliding pulse mode-locked laser. Each COEO can simultaneously generate short optical pulses and spectrally pure radio frequency (RF) signals. With these devices, we obtained optical pulses as short as 6.2 ps and RF signals as high, in frequency, as 18.2 GHz with a spectral purity comparable with an HP83731B synthesizer. These experiments demonstrate that COEO's are promising compact sources for generating low jitter optical pulses and low phase noise RF/millimeter wave signals.

References

1. X. S. Yao and L. Maleki, "Converting light into spectrally pure microwave oscillation", Opt. Lett., vol. 21, no. 7, pp.  483- 485, 1996 .
2. X. S. Yao and L. Maleki, "Optoelectronic microwave oscillator ", J. Opt. Soc. Amer. B, vol. 13, no. 8, pp.  1725- 1735, 1996 .
3. X. S. Yao and L. Maleki, "Ultra-low phase noise dual-loop optoelectronic oscillator", in Proc. OFC'98 Tech. Dig., 1998, pp.  353- 354. 
4. X. S. Yao and L. Maleki, "Dual microwave and optical oscillator ", Opt. Lett., vol. 22, no. 24, pp.  1867- 1869, 1997 .
5. M. Nakazawa, E. Yoshida and Y. Kimura, "Ultrastable harmonically and regeneratively modelocked polarization-maintaining erbium fiber laser", Electron. Lett., vol. 30, no. 19, pp.  1603- 1605, 1994 .
6. G. R. Huggett, "Mode-locking of CW lasers by regenrative RF feedback", Appl. Phys. Lett., vol. 13, no. 5, pp.  186- 187, 1968 .
7. J. D. Kafka, M. L. Watts and J. J. Pieterse, "Picosecond and femtosecond pulse generation in a regeneratively mode-locked Ti : Sapphire laser", IEEE J. Quantum Electron., vol. 28, no. 10, pp.  2151- 2161, 1992 .
8. Y. K. Chen and M. Wu, "Monolithic colliding-pulse mode-locked quantum well lasers", IEEE J. Quantum Electron., vol. 28, no. 10, pp.  2176 - 2185, 1992 .
9. L. Davis, M. G. Young, D. Doughterty, S. Keo, R. Muller and P. Maker, "Multi-wavelength mode-locked laser arrays for WDM applications", Electron. Lett. , vol. 34, no.  19, pp.  1858- 1860, 1998 .
10. L. Davis, M. G. Young, D. Doughterty and S. Forrouhar, "Wavelength control in mode-locked lasers for WDM applications", in Proc. SPIE Photon. West, San Jose, CA, Jan. 1998, .