Terabit Optical Processing using Comb Locked Amplified Signal Synthesis
All-optical signal processing promises a route to unprecedented processing bandwidths - orders of magnitude greater than possible using electronics. Ultrafast optical processing offers the potential to revolutionise many existing...
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Descripción del proyecto
All-optical signal processing promises a route to unprecedented processing bandwidths - orders of magnitude greater than possible using electronics. Ultrafast optical processing offers the potential to revolutionise many existing fields of photonic applications including telecommunications, metrology, and optical sensing. It also promises to be a critical technology for other emerging disciplines including environmental science, biology, medicine and security. However, its application has been hindered by the lack of a number of critical components – in particular the availability of a high-power, low-noise, truly-broadband, optical signal synthesizer/arbitrary waveform generator operable up to the multi-THz regime. To develop such a device requires full control over the amplitude and phase of large-bandwidth high repetition rate optical signals which has been a challenge to date. Here, we propose to investigate one possible approach to realise a high performance, optical signal synthesizer based on the coherent superposition of multiple, phase locked lasers operating at spectrally-distant optical frequencies (e.g. on a 1 THz grid to allow THz pulse train generation). To achieve the high level of coherence among these lasers we propose to phase lock them to a high-quality optical ‘ruler’ (optical comb). This approach brings several important advantages over the direct use of line-filtered optical combs - the only other real alternative approach to date. These include: (i) a much larger line spacing (e.g. >1 THz, as opposed to 250 MHz – 10 GHz for conventional combs); (ii) far higher powers-per line (e.g. 50 mW, as opposed to ~1 µW for a typical comb) and; (iii) reduced demands on the associated filters and combiners. We propose to demonstrate the advantages and potential of our approach in a number of demanding telecom based optical signal processing applications and to explore other uses of the synthesiser in THz photonics, sensing and metrology.