Low-Power, Reconfigurable Brillouin RF Photonic Bandstop Filters

Abstract

Stimulated Brillouin Scattering (SBS) has been widely used to realize narrowband as well as wideband microwave photonic bandstop filters. However, most Brillouin based wide-band bandstop filters require large powers and have high complexity. In this letter, we propose a novel approach to realize a wideband, reconfigurable and tunable Brillouin-based microwave photonic bandstop filter using RF phase engineering. We demonstrate bandstop filters with suppression of >15 dB for moderate bandwidths and maximum bandwidth reconfigurability up to 1 GHz by using two pumps with powers of 8.2 dBm and 9.3 dBm. Further, we also demonstrate switching from a bandpass to a bandstop filter with simple phase manipulations. This letter presents numerical simulations, analysis, and experimental results for the proposed filter. Compared to conventional Brillouin systems, the proposed filter is extremely power-efficient.