High-quality optical frequency comb by spectral slicing of spectra broadened by SPM

Hillerkuss, D., Schellinger, T., Jordan, M., Weimann, C., Parmigiani, F., Resan, B., Weingarten, K., Ben-Ezra, S., Nebendahl, B., Koos, C., Freude, W. and Leuthold, J. (2013) High-quality optical frequency comb by spectral slicing of spectra broadened by SPM. IEEE Photonics Journal, 5 (5), 7201011-7201011. (doi:10.1109/JPHOT.2013.2280524).

Abstract

The paper introduces a spectral slicing technique that extends the useful spectral range of frequency combs generated through self-phase modulation (SPM) of mode-locked laser pulses. When generating frequency combs by SPM, the spectral range with high-quality carriers is usually limited due to spectral minima carrying too little power. To overcome these limitations, we combine suitable slices of broadened and non-broadened spectra. The concept was verified experimentally: A total number of 325 consecutive, equidistant subcarriers span a bandwidth of 4 THz. All subcarriers have an OCNR larger than 25.8 dB(0.1nm) and were derived from one mode-locked laser with a mode linewidth of approximately 1 kHz. The signal quality of the comb and in particular of each subcarrier was ultimately tested in a Tbit/s communications experiment. The comb quality allowed us to transmit 32.5 Tbit/s over 225 km with 100 Gbit/s dual polarization 16QAM signals on each of the subcarriers.

This record has no associated files available for download.

Contributors

Author: F. Parmigiani

Download statistics