Tunable Low-Jitter Low-Drift Spurious-Free Transposed-Frequency Optoelectronic Oscillator

Abstract

We propose and theoretically and experimentally demonstrate a novel tunable spurious-free single-loop optoelectronic oscillator (OEO) with low drift and low-phase noise. In the proposed transposed-frequency OEO (TF-OEO), a nonreciprocal bias unit and an optical phase modulator in a fiber Sagnac interferometer function jointly as an intrinsically drift-free intensity modulator, which improves the long-term drift. Besides, a transposed-frequency low-noise filtered amplifier is used which replaces the conventional radio frequency (RF) bandpass filter (BPF) and RF amplifier with an intermediate frequency (IF) BPF, an ultralow phase noise IF amplifier, and a tunable local oscillator, to attain frequency tuning and single-frequency selection with ultralow phase noise at the same time. The quality of the generated microwave signals is theoretically investigated and verified by experiments. Preliminary phase noise, frequency stability, spurious noise levels, and frequency tunability of the photonically generated microwave signal are also investigated. A microwave signal with a frequency tunable range of 15 MHz around 10.833 GHz is generated with no spurs. The generated microwave oscillation has a single-sideband phase noise of −120 dBc/Hz at 10 kHz offset from 10.833 GHz carrier, with 36 fs RMS timing jitter integrated from 1 kHz to 10 MHz. Long-term frequency stability measurements show ±0.05 ppm maximum fractional frequency deviation over 60 h, which is mainly limited by drift of the fiber delay line. The measured results show the long-term frequency stability (in terms of overlapping Allan deviation) within $8.7\times 10^{-9}$ at 1000 s averaging time.