Flat optical frequency comb generation and its application for optical waveform generation

Abstract

We demonstrate the generation of a flat optical frequency comb (OFC) using an electro absorption modulator (EAM) and two cascaded phase modulators (PM). Compared with previous flat OFC generation schemes using a Mach–Zehnder modulator (MZM) for amplitude gating of the phase modulated light, an EAM creates much shorter time window for amplitude gating, and more flattened OFC spectrum is obtained using EAM as an amplitude gate. In our experiment, a very flat OFC having 11 lines within 3-dB bandwidth (3.8nm), and 40GHz comb line spacing is generated. Besides the excellent spectral flatness, the strong time-domain linear-chirp of the generated OFC can be simply compensated by a dispersion compensation fiber (DCF) link, which is preferred for optical waveform generation based on spectral manipulation. In this paper, we also demonstrate the OFC application for generation of several optical waveforms by manipulating the amplitude and phase of the comb lines. High repetition-rate optical cosine pulse, optical pulse burst, optical square and triangle pulses are successfully generated.