Characterization and Compensation of the Residual Chirp in a Mach-Zehnder-Type Electro-Optical Intensity Modulator

Abstract

We utilize various techniques to characterize the residual phase modulation of a fiber-based Mach-Zehnder electro-optical intensity modulator. A heterodyne technique is used to directly measure the phase change due to a given change in intensity, thereby determining the chirp parameter of the device. This chirp parameter is also measured by examining the ratio of sidebands for sinusoidal amplitude modulation. Finally, the frequency chirp caused by an intensity pulse on the nanosecond time scale is measured via the heterodyne signal. We show that this chirp can be largely compensated with a separate phase modulator. The various measurements of the chirp parameter are in reasonable agreement.

11 pages, 6 figures

References in corpus (2)

• Coherent Control of Ultracold Collisions with Chirped Light: Direction Matters
• Generation of Arbitrary Frequency Chirps with a Fiber-Based Phase Modulator and Self-Injection-Locked Diode Laser

Cited by in corpus (4)

• Hilbert Transform based Quadrature Hybrid RF Photonic Coupler via a Micro-Resonator Optical Frequency Comb Source
• Maximizing the performance for microcomb based microwave photonic transversal signal processors
• Designing and analyzing microwave photonic spectral domain filters based on transversal filtering with optical microcombs
• Contrasting the relative performance of RF photonic transversal signal processors based on microcombs using discrete components versus integrated devices