High Modulation Efficiency and Dynamic Range Optical Single Sideband Modulation Without Gain Penalty in Nonlinear Distortion Suppression

Abstract

The optical single sideband (OSSB) modulation with tunable optical carrier to sideband ratio (OCSR) is a promising and popular technique in wideband analog signal transmission and microwave signal processing, which can improve modulation efficiency and combat the fiber chromatic dispersion. However, in all reported schemes for achieving OSSB modulation with tunable OCSR, the spurious free dynamic ranges (SFDR) of the systems are all limited by the third-order intermodulation distortion (IMD3). In this paper, our object is to improve the SFDR and suppress the IMD3 in a novel OSSB modulation with tunable OCSR. The proposed system consists of a primary channel and a secondary channel. In primary channel, an OSSB modulation with tunable OCSR is implemented. In secondary channel, the optical carrier and first-order sidebands are perfectly cancelled out, which can suppress the IMD3 without gain penalty at the same received optical power. In this way, a large-SFDR OSSB modulation with tunable OCSR is realized. Experimental results exhibit that the IMD3 gets effective cancellations without gain penalty under unchanged total received power, and the output microwave signal power obtains about 11-dB improvement by optimizing the OCSR. A greatly increased SFDR of over 128 dBHz4/5 is achieved in the proposed system.