Impulse Response Measurement of Few-Mode Fiber Systems by Coherence-Recovered Linear Optical Sampling

Abstract

This paper presents impulse response measurements of few-mode optical fibers and transmission lines that were obtained by using coherence-recovered linear optical sampling or a two-comb interferometer. When performing a measurement, the probe pulse source and the sampling pulse source may be far from each other, particularly when the fibers are installed in the field, and the fiber length may exceed several tens kilometers. In this paper, by modifying a previously proposed referencing technique, the coherence between two pulse lasers is equivalently maintained by canceling out the phase noise caused both by the light sources and perturbations in the fiber. Hence, the amplitude averaging is used to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio. As a result, we can measure the impulse responses of multimode fibers with a dynamic range of 80 dB and a time resolution of a few picoseconds, over tens nanoseconds of differential mode delay.