Abstract

An ultrahigh-resolution optical vector analyzer (OVA) is proposed and experimentally demonstrated based on microwave photonic frequency downconversion and fixed low-frequency electrical phase-magnitude detection. In the proposed OVA, two optical single-sideband (OSSB) signals are generated by two RF signals with a fixed frequency spacing. One propagates through an optical device under test (DUT) and is then combined with the other before entering to a low-speed photodetector. By photodetection, a low-frequency and frequency-fixed photocurrent carrying the spectral responses is achieved. Hence, a low-frequency electrical phase-magnitude detector is sufficient to extract the magnitude and phase. Sweeping the frequency of the RF signals, the spectral responses of the DUT can be obtained. As compared with the conventional OSSB- and optical double-sideband-based OVA, the proposed OVA avoids the use of high-speed photodetection and broadband electrical phase-magnitude detection. In addition, it is inherently immune to the measurement errors induced by high-order sidebands and has the capability of measuring arbitrary spectral responses. In an experiment, the proposed OVA is implemented based on an electrical phase-magnitude detector working at 10 MHz. The measurement resolution is 1 MHz, and the measurement range is larger than 45 GHz.

© 2018 Optical Society of America

Ultrafast and ultrahigh-resolution optical vector analysis using linearly frequency-modulated waveform and dechirp processing

Shupeng Li, Min Xue, Ting Qing, Changyuan Yu, Lugang Wu, and Shilong Pan
Opt. Lett. 44(13) 3322-3325 (2019)

Ultrahigh-resolution and wideband optical vector analysis for arbitrary responses

Shifeng Liu, Min Xue, Jianbin Fu, Lugang Wu, and Shilong Pan
Opt. Lett. 43(4) 727-730 (2018)

Ultrahigh-resolution optical vector analyzer for multiple parallel measurements based on frequency-domain analysis

Bin Wang, Xinyu Fan, Shuangxiang Zhao, and Weifeng Zhang
Opt. Lett. 47(9) 2318-2321 (2022)

Optical vector analysis based on double-sideband modulation and stimulated Brillouin scattering

Ting Qing, Shupeng Li, Min Xue, and Shilong Pan
Opt. Lett. 41(15) 3671-3674 (2016)

Optical vector analyzer with time-domain analysis capability

Shupeng Li, Ting Qing, Lihan Wang, Xufeng Chen, Yijie Fang, Xiaohu Tang, Meihui Cao, and Shilong Pan
Opt. Lett. 46(2) 186-189 (2021)