High-precision Distribution of Highly-stable Optical Pulse Trains with Sub-10-fs Timing Jitter

Abstract

High-precision optical pulse trains distribution via fibre links has made huge impacts in many fields. In most published works, the accuracies are still fundamentally limited by some unavoidable noises, such as thermal and shot noise from conventional photodiodes, thermal noise from mixers. Here, we demonstrate a new high-precision timing distribution system by using highly-precision phase detector to overcome the limitations. Instead of using photodiodes and microwave mixers, we use several fibre Sagnac-loop-based optical-microwave phase detectors to realize optical-electrical conversion and phase measurements, for suppressing the noises and achieving ultra-high accuracy. A 10-km fibre link distribution experiment shows our system provides a residual instability at the level of 4.6*10-15@1-s and 6.1*10-18@10000-s, with an integrated timing jitter as low as 3.8 fs in a bandwidth of 1 Hz to 100 KHz. This low instability and timing jitter makes it possible that our system can be used in the optical clock distribution or the applications for the facilities which require extremely accuracy frequency time synchronization.

24 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (4)

• A laser frequency comb that enables radial velocity measurements with a precision of 1 cm s${}^{-1}$
• Sub-femtosecond synchronization of microwave oscillators with mode-locked Er-fiber lasers
• Analysis of shot noise in the detection of ultrashort optical pulse trains
• Ultralow Phase Noise Microwave Generation From Mode-Locked Er-Fiber Lasers With Subfemtosecond Integrated Timing Jitter