We demonstrate a monostatic LiDAR based on an InP photonic integrated optical phased array (OPA). The system utilizes an OPA with on-chip amplification which transmits and receives light simultaneously through an array of eight end-fire waveguide antennas. The OPA is capable of a 4.6° angular resolution and a 41° field of view. The on-chip amplifiers provide up to 21.5dB gain in a 1465-1600nm wavelength range. We show proof-of-principle FMCW (frequency modulated continuous wave) sensing through the monostatic OPA. The system relies on the frequency modulation with up to 10GHz frequency excursion of an external optically isolated DFB laser, which allows the simultaneous detection of range and velocity. The measurements were performed with a reflective target located ~2m away from the OPA, by varying the target position and velocity of 30 cm and ±5cm/s respectively. To the best of our knowledge, we demonstrated the first monostatic FMCW LiDAR implementation on an integrated InP OPA.
Coherent and Spectral beam combining are methods used to achieve very high output powers by combining beams from multiple fiber laser sources. In coherent beam combining, the seed laser source is common for all fiber amplifiers, while in spectral beam combining, each fiber amplifier needs a different seed laser due to the requirement of distinct wavelengths. This is a major disadvantage in spectral beam combining since each amplifier needs an independent single-frequency laser, line-broadener, temperature and current controller. This adds substantial component cost and complexity. However, spectral beam combining has advantages over coherent beam combining such as not requiring complex phase stabilization mechanisms and graceful degradation of system output to individual amplifier failure. What is desirable is a compact, single module seed laser source for spectral combining. In this work, we demonstrate such a system based on an electro-optic high repetition rate comb generator incorporating a line-broadener for stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) suppression and a de-multiplexer to provide distinct wavelengths in distinct fiber ports. In this system, the output wavelengths have a carrier separation of 50GHz in the C-band and tunable linewidth as required for SBS suppression, based on phase modulation with noise, from a single frequency to 4GHz. Further, we demonstrate that this system enables superior SBS control by allowing for suitable altering of the line-shape in the de-multiplexer. In fiber amplifiers, SBS is enhanced due to seeding by the back-reflected component of laser spectra. Here, we avoid it by reducing the power in the laser line-shape at the SBS band.
Broadband femtosecond supercontinuum sources find applications in fields such as Optical Coherence Tomography, fluorescence lifetime imaging, and frequency metrology. A mechanism to achieve the required spectral bandwidth is to broaden the output of a femtosecond laser source in nonlinear media such as highly nonlinear fibers (HNLF) utilizing a combination of nonlinear effects such as self-phase modulation (SPM) and four-wave mixing (FWM). However, conventional spectral broadening often suffers from supercontinua with degraded spectral flatness. The profile of the broadened spectrum depends on the properties of the medium, as well as the power and the temporal profile of the input pulse. The pulse can be shaped before broadening to improve the supercontinuum spectrum. However, the envelope is highly sensitive to the pulse spectral phase, potentially time-varying, resulting in a sub-optimal performance with any single pass optimization approach. Here, we overcome this by adaptively optimizing the input pulse by perturbing the spectral phase in an automated closed-control loop. A Fourier pulse shaper modifies the C-band sub-picosecond pulses from a mode-locked fiber laser before spectral broadening in HNLF. An evolutionary strategy algorithm is used to process the measured spectrum and adaptively optimize the spectral phase to realize a smooth supercontinuum with a broad Gaussian spectrum iteratively. We allowed the spectral phase to evolve with multiple variables across the pulse. We achieved a 4X bandwidth enhancement of the input pulse with high fidelity between the supercontinuum spectra and the target Gaussian shape. Spectral fluctuations were <3dB across the bandwidth of the generated supercontinuum.
Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) is the lowest threshold nonlinear effect that limits power scaling in narrow linewidth continuous wave fiber lasers. While several SBS mitigation techniques exist, optical linewidth broadening through external phase modulation has become the predominant method for SBS suppression. Arbitrary waveform generators (AWG) and pseudo-random binary sequence (PRBS) modulation schemes provide enhanced control of lineshape to effectively mitigate SBS but are expensive and difficult to implement. White noise (WNS) phase modulation is simple and easy to implement, but the resulting line shape is non-ideal and has a slow roll-off. Thus, the SBS enhancement obtained experimentally with WNS broadening is reasonably lower than the theoretical value. We attribute this to the increased SBS seeding due to the overlap between the WNS broadened signal and the Brillouin gain spectrum. A modulation scheme that is implemented easily and provides adequate line shape control would be of great advantage from a practical and engineering point of view. In this work, we propose a simple, yet powerful modulation technique to synthesize a line shape to have fast roll-off and improved flatness by incorporating dual sine and noise modulation. An in-house built kW-class, polarization maintaining, multi-stage Ytterbium-doped fiber amplifier is used to quantify the SBS enhancement of the proposed modulation scheme. We experimentally compare the results to that of pure noise broadened modulation at similar RMS linewidths and demonstrate over 2.3x enhancement in SBS limited output power at ~7.3GHz and <1kW SBS unlimited output power at ~10.4GHz in a fully polarization maintained system.
Temporal coherence control is a vital tool to achieve power scaling by overcoming stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). Conventional methods through phase modulation, with a sinusoidal drive or white noise source are limited in the achievable linewidth tunability due to the bandwidth of the RF drive and/or power handling of the phase modulator. Linewidth tuning range can be further increased by phase modulation amplification through cascaded four-wave mixing between multiple input lasers. When the input lasers are correlated, linewidth does not change with mixing order. However, in the case of uncorrelated input lasers, the linewidth increases progressively with increase in cascaded order. In this work, continuous linewidth tuning is achieved in two parts. From single frequency to ~7GHz, a single input laser at the required wavelength is line-broadened with phase modulation driven by a filtered white-noise source. Beyond this, two uncorrelated pumps are chosen, similarly broadened, amplified and sent through highly nonlinear fiber which performs cascaded four-wave mixing based phase modulation amplification. A demultiplexer extracts the required cascaded order and the two input lasers are tuned in wavelength appropriately to ensure the output center wavelength is constant. With the two effects together, continuous linewidth tuning at a single C-band wavelength from single frequency to more than 30GHz is achieved. The upper limit can be enhanced with power scaling. These principles can be translated to 1064nm wavelength, relevant to power combining and SBS limited power scaling of Ytterbium lasers using a combination of 1064nm phase modulators and nonlinear PCFs for cascaded four-wave mixing.
High repetition rate pulsed lasers are used for applications such as highspeed optical communications, nonlinear optics and optical sampling. Conventionally, mode locked lasers are used as pulsed sources. However, they suffer from low repetition rate that is not tunable. Electro-optic modulation allows generation of frequency combs with tunable high repetition rate. These combs can be compressed to generate pulses, but the pulse widths are large owing to the limited bandwidth of electro-optic frequency combs. Though, modulators can be cascaded to scale the bandwidth, it is only a linear enhancement and requires additional RF components. Spectral broadening of these combs in nonlinear fibers results in marginally improved bandwidths. The broadening achieved at a given optical power can be enhanced several times by suitably modifying the temporal profile of the comb before spectral broadening with a pulse-shaper. In this work, electro-optic intensity and phase modulators are driven at 25GHz to generate an initial comb. A pulse-shaper adaptively optimises the temporal profile of the electro-optic frequency comb to enhance the spectral broadening in highly nonlinear fiber (HNLF). The optimised comb is power scaled in an Er-Yb co-doped fiber amplifier before HNLF. The adaptively optimised comb is compressed with single mode fiber and is characterized with zero delay implementation of spectral shearing interferometry to obtain the spectral phase and temporal profile of the pulses. The output pulses have 1 dB bandwidth of ~0.6 ps and 3 dB bandwidth of ~ 1 ps with high repetition rate of 25GHz. This adaptive technique is shown to be immune to drifts and changes in modulator drive conditions.
Narrow linewidth fiber lasers find widespread applications in beam combining, frequency conversion and remote detection. Power scaling of these lasers is mainly limited by Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). Currently, SBS is mitigated through linewidth broadening and/or fibers with enhanced mode area. The latter suffers from problems of beam degradation and modal instability making line broadening the primary technique for SBS suppression. Line broadening can be achieved with phase modulation of lasers using white noise, pseudo-random bit streams or arbitrary waveform generators. The simplest implementation is with white noise source with the latter two requiring greater resources. We recently demonstrated a 10GHz linewidth 0.5kW polarization maintaining fiber laser, where it was observed that the SBS threshold did not directly scale with linewidth. This effect was identified as arising from the slow roll-off of the spectrum in white-noise modulated spectra which seeds the SBS process. The seeding is due to the reflections from the fiber end facet at these broadened linewidths where the spectrum has appreciable power at the Stokes wavelength. This is anticipated to be fundamental limiter for power scaling of narrow linewidth fiber lasers. In this work we overcome these drawbacks through a simple phase modulation scheme that incorporates noise waveforms together with sinusoidal modulation. This enables the spectrum to have sharp roll-off with flatter central region resulting in substantial reduction in seeding of SBS from end facet. With this simple architecture, we demonstrate scaling of SBS limited power by more than 1.5 times over pure noise modulation.
High power polarised narrow linewidth sources are of immense importance in coherent beam combining (increased path length accuracy), spectral beam combining (reduced angular spread), non-linear frequency conversion (increased parametric gain) and remote detection. Power scaling of narrow linewidth sources is primarily limited by Stimulated Brillouin Scattering which can be overcome by spectral broadening before amplification to higher powers. Various applications have different requirements of spectral purity and power which can be met if the source line width is tunable. We demonstrate a narrow line width polarisation maintaining (PM) laser with continuous linewidth tuning from ~2.88 GHz to ~9.88 GHz with over 20 W of output power with a polarisation extinction ratio (PER) greater than 20 dB. We achieve continuous linewidth tuning through pure phase modulation of a 1064 nm DBR laser with a white noise source whose bandwidth and power are tuned with a low pass filter bank and variable attenuation of the drive voltage to the modulator. This dual control mechanism enables gapless tuning of the linewidth of the source. A cascade of optimized PM Yb-doped fiber preamplifier and power amplifier is used to scale the output power to over 20W. Combined with the wavelength tuning of the DBR seed, the tunable spectral width makes it versatile for use in a wide range of applications.
High repetition rate frequency combs are predominantly used in optical communications, astronomical spectrographs and microwave photonics. Spectral broadening of electro-optic combs based on cascaded intensity and phase modulators with highly nonlinear fibers (HNLF) provides broadband combs with tunable repetition-rate and center-frequency. Spectral broadening is achieved using nonlinear effects such as self-phase modulation which requires substantial time dependent intensity at the input. To achieve this, the combs are compressed to a pulse using either fiber-based devices or pulse shapers. However, this has resulted in poor quality spectral broadening. Determining the optimal shaping profile of the input electro-optic comb for efficient spectral broadening is not direct due to the complex interplay between multiple parameters such as length, non-linear coefficient and dispersion of the nonlinear media, the initial spectral phases and power of the comb and modulator biasing conditions. This problem has been addressed here using adaptive pulse shaping. We use cascaded electro-optic modulators to generate a comb with 9 lines (within 20dB) around 1550nm at 25GHz repetition-rate. A wave-shaper changes the spectral phase of the comb. Dynamic spectral phase optimization by stochastic perturbations is performed in a closed loop by processing the output spectrum to maximize spectral bandwidth. With an output power of ~210mW, adaptive optimization more than tripled the number of lines to 29 (within 20dB) with a smooth spectral envelope while the unoptimized case causes negligible broadening (11 lines). We anticipate that the demonstrated testbed will enable more advanced methods of machine learning towards optimization and shaping of frequency combs.
Power scaling of narrow-linewidth, continuous-wave, fiber lasers with near-diffraction-limited beam quality is primarily limited by stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS). Among several SBS mitigation techniques, line broadening by phasemodulation has been widely used. Recently, enhanced SBS seeding (threshold reduction) due to spectral overlap between the backscattered, line-broadened signal and the SBS gain spectrum has been reported. Backscattering of the signal is composed of the Rayleigh component and reflections from the end termination. However, in high power amplifiers with small lengths of optical fiber used, the Rayleigh component of the backscatter is anticipated to be small. Here, we report conclusive experimental evidence that even very small reflections from the output facet are enough to substantially reduce the SBS threshold due to spectral overlap. We demonstrate this in a 500W, white noise phasemodulated, narrow-linewidth, polarization-maintaining power amplifier operating at 1064nm. Two commonly used fiber terminations are utilized. In the first case, the amplifier is terminated by a high-power laser cable with an end-cap and anti-reflection coating and in the second case, by an angle cleaved passive delivery fiber. Back-reflections from the angle cleaved facet (<80) providing ~70dB isolation (ideal case) was enough to enhance SBS. We analyzed the threshold differences between the two cases as a function of linewidth from 4.91GHz to ~10GHz. At smaller linewidths, the difference was negligible while at larger linewidths, there was a substantial difference in thresholds (<20%). This linewidth dependent difference in thresholds was accurately simulated by the backward seeding of SBS by the linebroadened signal, thus conclusively proving this effect.
Demand for bandwidth in optical communications necessitates the development of scalable transceivers that cater to these needs. For this, in DWDM systems with/without Superchannels, the optical source needs to provide a large number of optical carriers. The conventional method of utilizing separate lasers makes the system bulky and inefficient. A multi-wavelength source which spans the entire C-band with sufficient power is needed to replace individual lasers. In addition, multi-wavelength sources at high repetition rates are necessary in various applications such as spectroscopy, astronomical spectrograph calibration, microwave photonics and arbitrary waveform generation. Here, we demonstrate a novel technique for equalized, multi-wavelength source generation which generates over 160 lines at 25GHz repetition rate, spanning the entire C-band with total power >700mW. A 25GHz Comb with 16 lines is generated around 1550nm starting with two individual lasers using a system of directly driven, cascaded intensity and phase modulators. This is then amplified to >1W using an optimized, Erbium-Ytterbium co-doped fiber amplifier. Subsequently, they are passed through Highly NonLinear Fiber at its zero-dispersion wavelength. Through cascaded Four Wave Mixing, a ten-fold increase in the number of lines is demonstrated. A bandwidth of 4.32 THz (174 lines, SNR>15 dB), covering the entire C-band is generated. Enhanced spectral broadening is enabled by two key aspects - Dual laser input provides the optimal temporal profile for spectral broadening while the comb generation prior to amplification enables greater power scaling by suppression of Brillouin scattering. The multi-wavelength source is extremely agile with tunable center frequency and repetition rate.
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