Broadband Optical Frequency Comb Generation With Flexible Frequency Spacing and Center Wavelength

A broadband optical frequency comb with a flexible frequency spacing and a center wavelength is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The proposed scheme consists of a single continuous-wave laser, cascaded Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM) and phase modulator (PM), two-stage dispersion-fl...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Siyuan Yu, Fangdi Bao, Hao Hu
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: IEEE 2018-01-01
Series:IEEE Photonics Journal
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Online Access:https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8354784/
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Summary:A broadband optical frequency comb with a flexible frequency spacing and a center wavelength is proposed and experimentally demonstrated. The proposed scheme consists of a single continuous-wave laser, cascaded Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM) and phase modulator (PM), two-stage dispersion-flattened highly nonlinear fibers (DF-HNLFs), and a single-mode fiber in between. A narrow-band frequency comb is generated in the MZM and PM, and a broadband frequency comb is achieved by a self-phase modulation based spectral broadening in the DF-HNLFs. Since the DF-HNLF has low dispersion over a wide wavelength range, the central wavelength of the generated frequency comb can be tuned from 1535 to 1564 nm. In addition, the central wavelength of frequency comb has a potential to be extended to L-band according to the dispersion profile of the DF-HNLF and the operation bandwidths of the MZM and PM. By tuning the driving radio-frequency signal, the frequency spacing of the generated frequency comb can be tuned. In the experiment, the frequency spacing of 25 and 40 GHz has been achieved.
ISSN:1943-0655